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Today, Dr. Bob Cannon, headmaster of Veritas Scholars Academy, shares invaluable insights about transitioning families into VSA's rigorous classical education program and what makes students thrive in this unique learning environment. Plus, learn about their approach to challenging students beyond conventional expectations, while fostering a genuine love of learning.

Episode Transcription

Note: This transcription may vary from the words used in the original episode for better readability.

Marlin Detweiler:
Hello again and welcome to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today again, we have as our guest, Dr. Bob Cannon, the headmaster of our online school, Veritas Scholars Academy. Bob, welcome.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Thanks, Marlin.

Marlin Detweiler:
Today, what we want to talk about is how families best transition into Veritas, how families succeed at Veritas. What are the things that you hear most when you hear from families about what it was like to come into our educational community?

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Yeah. I chuckle because people have their expectations about what their children will encounter or what they will experience when they join us. Probably one of the most common comments that I would hear is, well, you weren’t kidding.

Marlin Detweiler:
Kidding about what?

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Yeah. About a number of things. But the one thing that really does come to mind is that we often say to parents, this is a rigorous learning environment.

We strive to be rigorous without overwhelming. That’s a goal of ours. At a principled level, I and others here want students to love learning. We take those words very seriously. The concept is important to us.

I remember my own education as a boy, and I remember the trajectory that I was on of loving learning just a little bit less with passing years. I had a good education, but because of the experience of losing some of my love of learning, because of the ways that the system worked, it’s at the heart level that I want for students to have an experience where they cannot wait to get back to studying.

They can’t wait to get back into the classroom with their peers. They can’t wait to see their teachers again. I mean this in the best way, but I kind of enjoy, at the end of the year, seeing students and teachers alike shedding some tears. Yeah. Because that says something to me about the experience they’ve had.

Marlin Detweiler:
To people who haven’t experienced what you’re talking about. It is not almost, but downright unbelievable that that could be the case for them and for their children.

But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that. It’s every year I hear it. And it’s been going on for decades, where people are lamenting the fact students and teachers are lamenting the fact that the school year is over.

They love what they do, but it is a true statement that we are more rigorous than most, and that also has two factors to it.

One is there's more work during the school day during the school year than in many places. And the starting point for people coming in from grades after, say, fourth or fifth grade is probably ahead of where they've been. We've been very successful at helping get students up to speed. What does that look like in many instances?

You've been involved, as is my wife Laurie, with you. I've been involved in helping to set up programs for students to get up to speed. But what does that look like?

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Yeah. Two of the principal things that come to mind are, first of all, our teachers are extraordinary at coming alongside students and making them feel welcome in a class where it may be the first encounter that the student has had with Veritas.

There's something else that really stands out to me about the environment here, and that is that everything that we do is recorded, archived. And if a student is, for example, in the first month of school, recognizing that this is a different kind of learning environment from a previous learning environment, that if they're struggling a little bit to keep pace, they are able to review even portions of an archive in which a teacher conducted a class.

You just don't get that in a bricks-and-mortar setting. You know, it's not available.

Marlin Detweiler:
You don't have that ability. The other thing that's true is we have a lot of classes that are geared toward bringing students up to speed, a lot of what we call transition classes. And we, of course, have a lot of summer terms that are available to help bring students up to speed.

How much of those impacted bringing students in in the middle school junior high years?

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Not to be short about the answer, but quite a lot. I personally am of a mind that it is a wonderful thing for a student to be challenged.

I was one of those students. If I wasn't being challenged, I was just getting into trouble.

Or I was bored. And so I appreciate the mindset of challenging a student, and oftentimes, if parents have not encountered it when they encounter it for the first time, it's always a striking moment when they see their children doing something that they just didn't know they were capable of doing. Yeah. I think we underestimate children.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, let me comment on that too. Our job is to educate students according to the gifts God has given them. And the question then is by what standard? Where do we get our standards for what we consider to be reasonable? What can they actually do? And the one thing everybody knows about American education today is that we have some languishing statistics in math. Comparing ourselves to other countries, we're ranked in the third ten.

I don't know where we are with literature, but I think it's similar, or excuse me, with writing skills and that sort of thing. And the question is what? So we look to international standards to see what others are doing that are ranked ahead of us. And of course, we look to historic standards and see what students were doing 100, 200, 500 years ago.

And that's honestly where we get our standards from. It gives the appearance that we are rigorous beyond what's reasonable. And then we find that average students who have come up in our system excel at what they're doing because they, in fact, are capable. And the parents didn't even realize it.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
That's right. Yeah. Something else that comes to mind, Marlin, is that when students come to us in the earlier years, there is a lot of work to be done, there's no doubt. But it's not busywork. That's not what it's designed to be. The work that they do should be with a purpose, and they should, candidly, find joy in what they're doing.

And I think that if we set them up the right way to find joy in learning, we're setting them on the right trajectory for what comes in their future. In this classical environment, at the grammar level, students are memorizing, and they're memorizing in a lot of fun ways. They're chanting, they're rhyming, they're singing songs.

They're learning in a way that a lot of environments don't afford students, and the ways that we're setting them up to learn are just enjoyable. Students look forward to the next lesson.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Well, that's the whole idea of loving. It's a whole lot easier to do something that you love to do, to do something that's laborious. I remember when it came to history as an example, I really never liked history. And my K-12 education, I didn't like it much.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Neither, did I.

Marlin Detweiler:
And when I look back on that, why I didn't like it then and why I've come to love it now. The difference is I understand its value and purpose for studying it. When I was studying history and let's say the Middle Ages, I learned about the different roles that people had but didn't really have any historic context or understanding for what was important beyond that.

If I were to ask questions about it now, I would say, why does that matter? How did it happen? And major events weren't studied. I never learned. It was so meaningless. Now I would learn from history in order to live in the present.

And it's a very different purpose for it.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Certainly, my experience was very similar to that. And I too did not like history very much. And today I find myself appreciating it because I see the relevance.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. And that's what we want to set our students up to feel. But some people will easily see that working to the ability that God has given us is something that we're called to do here, that in Colossians, I'm working unto the Lord.

Tell me some other anecdotal stories that you've heard from students and parents who, after they've graduated, gone on to college. The students, of course, that you hear them coming back and telling you why it was so worth it.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
It's not uncommon to hear from students that they find themselves in a class surrounded by dozens or even hundreds of others, and they have some indication, whether it's feedback from a professor or the questions that they recognize, that they're able to answer.

I just last week received a Christmas letter, as sometimes we do. This letter came to me, and it was from a family of ours. Their son had graduated not long ago. The environment in which he found himself and others around here—well, this—I don't want to get too far down into the weeds here, but I'll briefly tell it like this.

He's military, and he found himself at boot camp where he was surrounded, of course, by others, including his commanding officer and others in leadership. He's home on break now with his family. The story that I heard from his parents is that—and this will just strike you as a funny little detail—but when he was young, as he was being classically educated, he was being taught all kinds of good material, and all of that came out.

One of my favorite parts of the story was that he had learned how to sew at home, and all the guys around him had not a clue what to do when buttons were falling off their clothing. He was the only guy who knew how to get buttons back on the clothing. It's a small example, and there were other examples, better examples that I could give, but by the time I read through this, I thought, isn't that exactly what we're setting someone up to do?

They're well-equipped in their minds to more than survive. They're actually thriving in an environment no matter what the environment is they're going to. But even simple things like that, they could see that this was a young man who is there to supply when something is needed. Yeah, and that's like 1/100th of the whole story.

Marlin Detweiler:
Well, we don’t teach sewing, but that's not your point.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
No, exactly. Exactly. My point is that he's in an environment where he is using all of the skills and talents that he has been able to exercise through his education with us. Even little details like that cause him to stand out from the others around him. He's doing so in such a way that he's not elevating himself above the others.

He's actually in a servant leadership kind of position. It is so easy to see a young man or a young lady like that being moved along in their development as professionals and as people because the people around them recognize there's something special about this individual. Yeah.

Marlin Detweiler:
We started by talking about the challenges that happen when families seek to transition from another educational system into Veritas. I think it would be good for us to spend a little time talking about the things you have observed that have helped people succeed the most. You certainly mentioned teachers and archives. Of course, we talked about the transition courses.

But candidly, just as a starting point, the people that do the best through our program are those that come up in our system because our system, kindergarten through 12th grade, our educational track, if you will, is geared to feed off of the prior year.

If you got something different the prior year, there immediately are some challenges, and those challenges escalate. We take students all the time, of course, in seventh through 12th grade. But if you come up kindergarten through sixth grade, rarely do I hear somebody saying, it's too rigorous or it's too much or it's too difficult. They just get it. They just jump right in. So the best way to succeed in our program is honestly to start in.

But not everybody listening today, not everybody that comes to us, has that opportunity because some of that water of time is gone under the bridge, and they find themselves in a different place. Talk about the challenges and the best way to meet those, for maybe the fourth grader or the seventh grader or even the 10th grader, or maybe all of them in separate ways.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Yeah. Fourth graders are very nimble, so I'm not as concerned about a fourth grader because they're very adaptable. To your point, someone who starts with us in the earlier grade—second, third, fourth—they are given a set of expectations that they become very accustomed to. Those expectations for a rigorous learning environment are no different as they make their way through the grade levels.

So that point resonates powerfully with me. Someone who comes to us in seventh grade, the one counsel—if I could give only one point of counsel to a family—is, while on the one hand, children are more capable than we sometimes give them credit for, and we should challenge them, on the other hand, a strong foundation is just so significant.

I can't overemphasize the point. This is why you referenced transition courses that we have earlier. If a student is not ready to move into a certain subject area with a certain course, don't push so hard that the student becomes overwhelmed because the material is above them, so to speak, or beyond them when you could instead build a strong foundation upon which to build, coming subjects.

So math is a classic area for this, Marlin, you understand math better than I do. Better than a lot of people I know. And I know that you'll agree that algebra is just crucial.

Marlin Detweiler:
It is the most important math course that 90% of the population takes.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
So if we push a student to go on to algebra two, when I say algebra, I'm thinking algebra one.

If we push that student to algebra two or even geometry or God forbid, prematurely pushing them into pre-calculus or higher subjects than that without that strong foundation in algebra one. And in our environment, if a student isn't quite ready for algebra one, we have pre-algebra, for example, where we're readying them for algebra one. The point here is that if we hastily or prematurely push a student towards a certain subject and they don't have the right foundation educationally to manage or navigate that subject, it may not go well.

I've seen some students who actually do recuperate when they find themselves in too rigorous a place. But we want students to love learning. We want them to have a strong and significant foundation in learning. We want them to be well equipped on the front end so that all that happens subsequently builds on what they have on that foundation that they've established.

So all of that to say, if students are going to enjoy learning and enjoy their education, then we shouldn't rush what's happening when they first join us. And I think that the counsel that we're able to provide families through family consultants, through our service team, through our academic advisors and others who would speak with a family, that counsel takes into account what a student has experienced before.

And we, through our experience, then discern well where it is a student ought to begin with us, and then we set them on the right trajectory so that they can also end well.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, it's in my 30-plus year experience of working in the area of classical education. I've come to believe that parents who don't have a large sample of how their kids are gifted or what they're capable of, tend to make, are inclined to make the mistake of my kid could never do that.

Or my kid is a genius and can handle anything you throw at them. And both extremes create problems that have to be attended to. And the first thing I want to say is, and if you looked at our education, if you grabbed our catalog and looked at the pace of things, the typical educator today, or even the typical person paying attention to education, believes that it's an education for the gifted.

Maybe for the elite, maybe for the privileged. And the fact of the matter is, that couldn't be. It's a little bit of a hyperbole to say it couldn't be further from the truth, but there is no truth in that. Our education is entirely achievable easily by 80% of the student population. And when we make a few little adaptations, we probably get to 90 or 95%.

The flip side of it is when we think that our child is a genius, sometimes we find they may be quite gifted, but there are a lot of children that are in the same way, and some of us do with kids coming up in the system and just being taught. And, you know, it's really fun to see.

What, we might say an average student accomplishing phenomenal things. Yeah. No doubt every day here. And it's because we have built an environment that lets children know they can do it. They can do it.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Yeah. There's also flexibility within this environment where I've had the great pleasure of seeing a student who is particularly gifted in languages, for example, and giving that student the ability, even outside of our typical structure, to study languages beyond what students normally study with us.

And as you know, we have modern foreign languages and we have ancient languages, and there's a lot from which to choose. But there are times when we have to customize an education to a student's particular gifting. Yeah, that's a student who is gifted in languages, but maybe not in another area. So we don't neglect the other areas.

But we do want to emphasize where a student's particular giftings are, and we're equipped to do that. And it's a lot of fun to watch it happen.

Marlin Detweiler:
It is fun to be able to give them a focus on their interests as they get the basic courses complete. Okay. So if, let me ask the question again of, as if I'm a parent, you know, I'm not sure my children can do this.

I love what I'm hearing, but I'm just not sure they could do it. How do you answer them?

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Yeah, from the experience that we've had, you wouldn't be the first to wonder if your children are going to be able to do this. And we have watched countless children, our students, accomplish things that they even sometimes surprise themselves.

You're also, in many ways, because of the environment that we have fostered here over the years, you would find yourself surrounded by people who are not only rooting for you but willing to at times bend over backwards to come alongside you and to help you and your children to succeed in this environment. And that's a characteristic that ought to define us.

And so I think that even though we already do that, we still wonder from moment to moment, how might we do that more or better? And there are ways in which that, perhaps not in this conversation, Marlin, but there are ways that we're thinking about those things, and there are some very real, tangible things happening behind the scenes, even today, even this week, with conversations that I have had with other members of the school team where we're thinking about how we might better come alongside parents and their children to make those good things happen.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was really, do you know it's their family? I get it, they worry about whether or not their student will be able to do the work. And now we're having we have dealt with tens of thousands of examples and can say confidently from a very large sample base, they can.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Yes. Yeah. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that.

And I think we did mention them. We referenced them before, but I should say again, that the group of educators that we get to work with here, our teachers who are on the front lines, as it were, working with our students, they are some of the most invested people I've ever seen in their students' lives.

There's a reason why at the end of the year, they're also shedding tears. Yeah, it's not just students. Our teachers love our students. And in fact, maybe I'm showing our cards a little too much here, but when you and I and our dean of academics interview teacher candidates, we will often ask them, what makes for a great teacher?

And I think that in some way we're looking for them to say that they, number one, love the Lord, because that's crucial. Number two, not that they love their subject. That's number three. Number two is that they love students. They love children. They love working with learners. If that's not present, well, then they might work somewhere else. But here they have to love their students.

Marlin Detweiler:
One of the things that always fascinates me, as we look at where families come from, is how many of them come from families that are already part of our community? Overwhelmingly, that is the number one source of new people coming to us. And I think that says something about the your child can do it, and it's a place that you will value highly once they're inside of it.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Yeah. No doubt. Yeah. That's the experience of thousands.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, it sure is. Well, Bob. Thank you. This is fun. Here we are. Talking about families, transitioning in and I don't know if you have any last words or not, before we call it an episode.

Dr. Bob Cannon:
Thanks for having me again.

I do enjoy these conversations, and I hope that something is taken away that's of great value to those who are listening. I delight in seeing people join our community here. And I know that our teachers and our academic advisors and so many others who work with families also feel that way about every encounter we have. So hope to see you in a classroom soon.

Marlin Detweiler:
You all have made it a remarkable place and a part of a really wonderful thing that we believe God is blessing. Thanks for what you do. Folks. Thanks again for joining us on this episode of Veritas Vox. The voice in classical Christian Education. We hope to see you again next time.