Four of our sloCAHS Seniors, after presenting their Senior Projects
Each year our full-time high school seniors complete and present a Senior Project, which is considered the capstone of the Rhetoric Stage in Classical Education. If you didn’t have a chance to come and hear their presentations this year, you missed out! Four of our seniors, with four very different and fascinating topics, presented their projects to a large SLOCA audience: Caleb Campbell, Tatum Gleason, Josh Ronda, and Stephon Tonko. It was remarkable to listen to these poised, engaging students, who were eager to share the knowledge they gained through this lengthy assignment.
Here’s a brief description of the four Senior Projects, along with the Seniors’ future plans, and a few photos from the morning:
Caleb Campbell
Senior Project Title: Original Latin Translation of St. Augustine's Confessions
Description: As an introduction both to the thought of Saint Augustine and to literary translation, I chose seven prayers from Augustine's Confessions to translate. Although all of the Confessions is structured as a prayer, the selections I chose most directly address God and almost all include a form of the word “I pray.” To aid me in deciding on a translation plan, I compared a handful of prominent translations of the Confessions. From this I at length decided that I wanted to stay close to the Latin while placing a heavy emphasis on preserving Augustine's powerful eloquence. I tried to accomplish this by translating as concisely as I could (in most situations). I rounded out my project with a reflection on translating, Augustine's philosophy and theology as embodied by the prayers, and the ultimate effects that translating Confessions had on me.
Future plans: Studying Classical Languages at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, ID
Tatum Gleason
Senior Project Title: I’m Coming Home, Sweet Home – Folk Music Revival and Video Games
Description: In the age of technology, video games have become an increasingly popular form of media, and one that many claim has destroyed the true culture of the world. This project is aimed towards showing how video games have contributed to the American folk revival, and specializes in music.
Future plans: Studying Music and Music Production starting at Cuesta College, possibly studying abroad, also pursuing Mortuary Science
Josh Ronda
Senior Project Title: Exploring the Uncanny Valley
Description: My senior project was a research paper about the practical and psychological effects of the Uncanny Valley, a phenomenon where a human representation or depiction looks or seems so human like that it creates a sense of unease in the viewer.
Future plans: Studying Graphic Design at Cal Poly, SLO
Stephon Tonko
Senior Project Title: SLOCAHS Student Council Process and Development
Description: Inspired by historical documents such as The Declaration of the Rights of Man, The Constitution of the United States, and Roberts Rules of Order, the founding documents of San Luis Obispo Classical Academy High School Student Government are both classically and modernly influenced. The result of centuries of literature, they are a renaissance of gratifying austerity, a slant of the winsome. Student Government is the new cornerstone of the SLOCA’s Rhetoric stage development, now and for the peers to come.
Future plans: Studying Computer Science at Norwich University, VT
The following seniors attended sloCAHS part-time, in partnership with their homeschool programs, and will also be graduating with this class:
Virginia Harding
Future plans: Taking a gap year before college to join the ballet company Ballet Magnificat! in Jackson, Mississippi
Gabriel Parkinson
For his homeschool program, Gabe completed a senior project on Saponification, which is the chemical process of making soap from fats and lye.
Future plans: Studying Liberal Studies and Spanish at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, CA
English teacher Paul McCullough opened the presentation, beautifully introducing the projects and encouraging both the seniors and the younger students in attendance to “Ask questions. Look for answers. Pay attention to what makes you wonder.” His words remind us why our students are here, and we wanted to share part of his address with you today as well:
A cartoonist, a political theorist, a classicist, and a modernist composer all walk into a classroom in San Luis Obispo, California… I don’t have a punchline for that joke, but I think it says a lot about our school that it’s the kind of place where such a setup can be written.
In just a moment, four of your fellow high school students will present their senior projects. They range across a variety of disciplines, as you’ve just heard: cartoon animation, Latin translation, theories of governance, music composition. Still, they have at least one thing in common. They each have found an entry point into what we might call The Great Conversation.
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 at 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 Triviuum. 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.
Caleb, Tatum, Stephon, Josh—what various and wonderful voices you have found. Welcome to the conversation. Welcome to the party…
And finally, are you wondering which colleges SLOCA graduates have been accepted to since the school began? Do people ever ask you what our high school graduates go on to do? Here’s an updated list!
SLOCAHS COLLEGE ACCEPTANCES 2013 – 2016
Three of our students are at Cuesta College and the others are attending 4-year colleges (some are at the same school). Starred schools are where our students are currently attending or planning to attend in the fall. Below each starred school are the degrees that these students are working on.
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Biola University (La Mirada, CA)
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Boston University (Boston, MA)
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*Cal Poly SLO (San Luis Obispo, CA)
Students studying: Theater, Music, History, Graphic Design -
Cal State Channel Islands (Camarillo, CA)
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Cal State Long Beach (Long Beach, CA)
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*Cal State Monterey (Seaside, CA)
Student studying: Social Work -
Cal State San Diego (San Diego, CA)
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Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI)
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Corban College (Salem, OR)
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George Fox University (Newberg, OR)
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Gonzaga University (Spokane, WA)
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*Grand Canyon College (Phoenix, AZ)
Students Studying: Physicians Assistant and Nursing -
Hillsdale College (Hillsdale, MI)
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Houston Baptist University (Houston, TX)
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Long Beach State University (Long Beach, CA)
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*New St. Andrews College (Moscow, ID)
Student Studying: Classical Languages -
Northern Arizona University (Flagstaff, AZ)
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*Norwich University (Northfield, VT)
Student studying: Computer Science -
San Diego State University (San Diego, CA)
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St. Mary’s College of CA (Moraga, CA)
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Texas A&M Engineering Academy at Blinn College (College Station, TX)
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*Torrey Honors at Biola University (La Mirada, CA)
Student studying: Art and Literature -
UC Santa Cruz (Santa Cruz, CA)
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UC Merced (Merced, CA)
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University of Dallas (Dallas, TX)
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*University of Nevada, Reno (Reno, NV)
Student Studying: Geology -
University of North Dakota, John D. Odegard School Of Aerospace Sciences Department of Computer Science (Grand Forks, ND)
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*University of Richmond (Richmond, VA)
Student Studying: International Relations and Philosophy -
*Westmont College (Santa Barbara, CA)
Student Studying: Liberal Studies and Spanish
