Senior Projects

As part of our Wonder theme this summer on the blog, we want to share a bit more about our seniors who graduated about a month ago.  Each year our high school seniors complete and present a Senior Project, which is considered the capstone of the Rhetoric Stage in Classical Education. They present their projects (this year, we had 10 presentations!) to other high school students, family, and anyone from our SLOCA community who wishes to come and hear them. 

Before we get to our first one, we want to go back a few years and highlight part of what our High School Literature teacher, Paul McCullough, shared with his audience at his opening address in 2017 as we feel it remains relevant and it reminds us why our students are at SLOCA.

Think for a moment about that somewhat shopworn phrase, The Great Conversation. This give-and-take of thought that has been going on for a long time, since Socrates, Homer, the Psalmist, since the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux in southern France, and who knows how long before. The conversation takes place through art, philosophy, science, engineering, architecture, politics, theology, poetry, culture. It is frequently interrupted—though not extinguished—by wars, famines, droughts, exiles, new modes of distraction. The tangible record of this conversation we’ve been having with ourselves, about ourselves we have called history. Like a medieval cathedral, the work cannot be completed by the generation that began it. And each generation that has come before you has said, It will not end with us.

What is the conversation about? It’s about us—who we are, who we ought to be, what dreams we want to dream, what is worth a life. Do they matter, the answers one gives to these top-heavy, open-ended, eternally confounding questions? Yes. Unequivocally. Even though they do little to help us secure our most basic human needs—to grow food, build shelters, defend the homestead, throw parties? Well, there’s another set of questions for you. 

In any case, the great conversation is why you are here, on a school campus. Has no one told you yet? You are here because a classical education is the best chance you have of being initiated into this Great Conversation so that you will not have to live your life stuck on the tiny time slice of the present moment without anything in your experience that reverberates through the centuries. What you will do with that is, of course, entirely up to you, as it should be.

For the moment, though, you are here because, as we all know, a conversation has three parts: listening, thinking, and speaking. Each part, we might say, corresponds to a stage of the Trivium. In the grammar stage, you are learning the who and the what—who has spoken and what the conversation has been about. You are listening. In the logic stage, you are learning the why—why one person might believe this, why another would think that. You are thinking. In the rhetoric stage, you are learning the how—how to have your own voice, how to say your piece, how to “put in your oar.” You are finally ready to speak. 

No one ever really masters these triune arts of listening, thinking, and speaking, and the separation between them is always to some extent artificial, provisional. But by the time you graduate from here, you, like these seniors, will have found an entry point into the conversation, a place to begin. You will have a voice. 

Riley Thompson

My senior project was on “creating a modern bestiary of the central coast”. A bestiary is a bound collection of illustrated studies of animals and plants, native to a specific area, and was often accompanied by a religious, moral lesson. The bestiary sought to incorporate art, science, and religion into one book. This art form was made popular during the Middle Ages. For my project, I wanted to make a modern bestiary that included eight linoleum block prints of birds and plants that are native to the central coast. I decided to leave out the moral lessons because I really wanted my final book to be simple and approachable to all whether or not they are religious. Through this project, I sought to bring aspects of the Middle Ages to the Central Coast today and modify the bestiary into something more specific to the time and place that we live in. 

Come back next time for our next Senior Project highlight! In the meantime, continue to…

“Ask questions. Look for answers. Pay attention to what makes you wonder.”

Enjoy your day!