Recite Night
Producing Powerful Speakers
Great speakers rarely just happen.
Classical education seeks to produce graduates who encompass the skills of critical thinking, logical reasoning, persuasive writing, and powerful speaking. These skills need to be taught, practiced, and polished consistently over students’ K-12 education. Great speakers rarely just happen. They must be taught, encouraged, and given consistent practice with speaking skills. At The Classical Academy, we begin working on these skills in grammar school and continue through graduation with the much loved tradition of Recite Nights among our school community.
Poetry, Prose, and Scripture Memorization
Recite Nights
In addition to students regularly speaking in front of their classmates, the Academy hosts four Recite Nights a school year. These take place on an evening outside of the school day hours. Classes and individuals prepare poetry, prose, or Scripture to recite to the community. These fun and light-hearted gatherings allow an atmosphere for our students to practice their speaking skills in a setting outside of their classroom teacher and peers. It allows them to recite in front of other adults they don’t know and become comfortable in speaking settings that are more unfamiliar.
As students move into the rhetoric school, the pieces they perform contain speeches and the option to recite a piece of poetry written by the student. Recite Nights also prepare our students to be in front of a panel and the school community to present and defend their senior rhetoric thesis.
Recite Night isn’t just for speaking skills.
When we fill our students’ hearts and minds with truth, goodness, and beauty, and we give them a rich and full database of linguistic patterns they have memorized through poetry, we suddenly see these language patterns come back out in students speaking and writing. Memorization is the most complete form of internalization, and the best way to intimately know something is to know it so well you can communicate effectively, fluently, and artistically.