A Fare-Forward to my Students

I have finished the year for STAR Torrey Academy. I still have some grading to do, but we had our last classes on Thursday and the banquet last night.

I was unsure what to expect from my first year teaching, but I have discovered that I love the occupation and hope to do much more of it in the future. Of course, the curriculum I have to work with helps significantly. This year I taught a class called “Inklings” that had a reading list of Tolkien, Lewis, Charles Williams, Sayers, and Sheldon VanAuken (who slips in the back door somehow).

If the great reading list wasn’t enough, I also had students who were bright-eyed and hard-working. It was phenomenal to spend an entire year with high school age students and have almost no discipline problems. Those few problems I had were resolved when Mr. Granath landed in the pool, fully clothed, at the LOTR party in Yorba Linda.

I will continue to teach in the program, but I will not be able to have all the same students that I have this year. At our end-of-the year banquet last night I said many difficult goodbyes to students that I will not have the joy of teaching next year.

A word to those students:

I hope and pray that you will be voyagers. There is a Voice above calling you to a new life, a life of learning and of exploration. It is a Voice calling you not to Life in spite of Death, but to Life through Death. There is a Voice that demands your allegiance and your obedience. It is none other than the Word who speaks out of Heaven, the Word spoken on Earth, who calls. In the words of the Poet, T.S. Eliot, “Not fare well, but fare forward, voyagers.” The joys of heaven are not for the slack of heart–they are not for those whose desires are for this world. And so, fare forward.

You will be missed and always be remembered as my first class of students. I love you, and thank you for your humbling words of encouragement this year. May you always be faithful to Christ our King.