Today, we are joined by Mandi Gerth, a seasoned classical Christian educator and author of Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom.

Mandi shares her insights on intentionally shaping classroom and homeschool culture through liturgical practices. Mandi draws from her experience as a teacher and parent to explain how shared experiences, embodied values, and common language, rooted in the classical tradition, naturally form students' hearts and minds.

Whether you’re a homeschool parent, a larger classroom teacher, or a classical education enthusiast, you will gain practical wisdom on creating ordered, joyful learning environments that pass on what is true, good, and beautiful.

To learn more about Mandi's work, visit her website: mrsgerthteaches.com.

Episode Transcription

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

Introduction

Marlin Detweiler:
Welcome again to another episode of Veritas Vox, the voice of classical Christian education. Today we have with us Mandi Gerth. Mandi, welcome.

Mandi Gerth:
Thanks for having me.

Marlin Detweiler:
Before we get into the book that you've authored and some of the conversations that that has prompted, tell us a little bit about yourself, personally, your education, your family, your career background that have led to your work?

Mandi Gerth:
Yes. So my husband and I have five children. Our oldest is married and teaching in New Hampshire with his wife. Our youngest is 14. So we have kind of a spread. We have three boys and then two girls. We moved to the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex in 2014 because we wanted a warmer climate. We wanted a bigger airport and we wanted a classical education for our children.

So we put them into a classical collaborative model school when we moved to the metroplex. And that's when I started learning what it meant. Like what it meant to take on a home day component, to be a teacher at home.

Marlin Detweiler:
The collaborative model is what's sometimes called a university model?

Mandi Gerth:
Yes, sir. Yes. So our hybrid model, some people are calling it now. But the school that they were in was was a university model school that had gone through the process of receiving that designation. And so yeah so I started learning what it was like to be to be very involved with the children's classical education.

And then in 2018, when a teaching position at the school opened up, I applied for it and got my first job teaching fifth grade. And I taught for just two days a week when the kids were at school. And then I was still home with them doing the homeschool component while I was teaching. So it was the perfect opportunity to get them to get.

Yeah, to get back into teaching full-time. You know, it was just a great it was a great fit for us as a family. And really helped me start to learn what it meant to teach in the classroom.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Very good. So how about yourself? What was your educational background?

Mandi Gerth:
Yeah. So I went to public school K-12.

Marlin Detweiler:
By the way, I did too. You don't have to be apologetic; I didn't get a great education either. I think my kids got a lot better education than I did, but it's the nature of where we were at the time. Right?

Mandi Gerth:
Agreed. Agreed. So. And then I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison and got a Bachelor of arts in journalism with an English minor. And then I worked for a little bit. Then we had children. Then I started teaching. And then during the Covid pandemic, I went back to school and got my master's from the University of Dallas and classical education.

Marlin Detweiler:
Oh, wonderful. Good for you. So what about your career and background? Put you in a position to write a book? What was it about that? I guess it would be appropriate here to mention the book is called Thoroughness and Charm. But let's. I'm more asking about you right now. Thank you. We will move to the subject matter of the book. But what positioned you to write that book? At that point?

Mandi Gerth:
Sure. So when I took that first classroom, I was struck with a lot of existential questions about why. Why was I doing this? Was I worthy of doing this? Did I understand the calling that had been placed upon me? And I really wanted.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, those are pretty heavy things that many teachers never think about.

Mandi Gerth:
Yeah. And I really wanted to do a good job. Like, I really wanted to do a good job. I wanted to make sure that what I was bringing to my students was the very best of me, the very best of the tradition, the very best of the curriculum. And then I also wanted to make sure that I could run a classroom that, I mean, I knew how to run a family of five, but running a classroom is different.

Marlin Detweiler:
Like running a family of 20 or more.

Mandi Gerth:
I had those two sort of tension points that I was trying to navigate and that's when I sat down and really attacked my classroom in a way that sort of helped me bring the very best to my students and also run the classroom in a way that was ordered and joyful. And then when my curriculum director came and observed my classroom, he asked me if I would put together a professional development for our faculty on classroom culture.

And I did that. And then the next year, he said, you need to submit that same talk to ACCS. And so I did that. And then Tom Spencer was generous and allowed me to give my very first presentation ACCS. Yes. And Dallas.

Marlin Detweiler:
So this was a talk that you'd gave at ACCS in 2025?

Mandi Gerth:
No, I the first time I gave it was like 2019.

Marlin Detweiler:
Oh okay. Okay.

Mandi Gerth:
So then so then Tom heard it and put it in the foundation's track. So that asks grammar school teachers who are going through the certification process have the opportunity to listen to it.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay.

Mandi Gerth:
And then and then I would, I would go to ACCS and speak on different things and teachers would stop me in the lobby and they would say, we saw your video during the foundation's track. And we're putting into practice some of the things that you suggested in our classrooms are much more joyful. We enjoy poetry with our students now.

Thank you. And it would make me tear up because I had just thought that I was doing what I was asked to do. And the Lord really took it someplace that I was not, I wasn't expecting.

The Book: Thoroughness and Charm

Marlin Detweiler:

Yeah. That's wonderful. So that was starting to happen. 2018, 2019 probably into Covid year 2020. So the book that you've written, Thoroughness and Charm does is have a subtitle that I should note?

Mandi Gerth:
Sure. The subtitle is Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom.

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom. Yes. Was released, I believe, in May of 2025.

Mandi Gerth:
Yes.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Why did you write the book?

Mandi Gerth:
I wrote the book because of those conversations I was having with teachers where they were giving me the feedback that this was something that was significant to how they approached their teaching. They were resonating with the ideas. So the feedback I was getting from them was that not only did it help them philosophically better understand what they were supposed to be doing in the classroom but it also gave them some classroom management help. And so I felt like this is an idea that needed to be shared with more teachers.

Marlin Detweiler:
A book is a little bit in my thinking. A book is a little bit easier to learn from, you know, in a more meaningful way, in a way that sinks in more deeply than a video or a talk or something like that. It unpacks a lot more. Not to mention it's just a longer piece.

So it has more information. But I think the delivery method is also one that is helpful. And so that makes a lot of sense. So one question I always like to ask, because sometimes people are surprised to hear the answer is what would you. It's only at this point in the recording of this interview it's less than a year that it's been out there. What would you do differently if you had it to do again? If anything?

Mandi Gerth:
Okay. So I think I would make the appendix longer. So the the the teachers that I'm running into who have read the book and are resonating with it are telling me that they that they are using the the resources in the appendix very faithfully and very thoroughly. And so I would probably I would probably add more to that to the appendix.

Marlin Detweiler:
More tools to put it in the toolbox of the teachers. Yeah, that may serve well. So one of the phrases that caught my imagination was a culture of the educational setting. You've worked in both the homeschool world and the school world and then hybrid between the two. So you appreciate that. And I'm using educational setting instead of saying classroom for a reason.

Creating Culture in Your Educational Setting

Marlin Detweiler:
Because we're trying to address the market of the classical education community which is both the schools and the home schools. So what? What do you mean by culture of the educational setting?

Mandi Gerth:
Sure. So. The way that I realized I had a classroom culture that was working was the things that I had put into routine practices or liturgies throughout the classroom. Day started showing up elsewhere when the students weren't asked to reproduce them. So things that we had memorized and recited in the morning started showing up in the afternoon or speeches that we had memorized started showing up in essays and I realized that this was and this was inculturation.

This was paideia. This is what was happening. And then I asked myself, well, like, how did that how did that happen? Because while I think that culture is and is mysterious and transcendent and we inherit it much more than we can produce it, you still have to plan for it. So one of the lessons that I learned as a mom was, I can I can want a family culture that enjoys eating a meal together and conversing with one another.

I can want that for my family. But if I don't actually find the recipes and shop for the ingredients and do the work of cooking the dinner, that culture will never happen. It it. So there's this this this magic combination of planning and preparedness plus up just space to allow something mysterious to happen that that you can't really control.

And it's not an on demand product. So I started to think through, well, what are the things that I was doing on a daily basis that were intentional, that I had been planning. And I sort of thought to myself that they were in three categories. They were shared experiences, embodied values and common language.

So I was creating experiences for my students to all have together at the same time. I was putting on before them the things that I thought were the most important about what we were there to do through how I was spending my time and what cultural artifacts I was bringing to them, what questions I was asking them about those cultural artifacts, like how we were interacting with all of those things.

That was an embodiment that I put on and I showed it to them. So it was embodied values, it was shared experiences and it was common language. And by common language, I mean, like I was giving them words that were mapped to transcendent ideas. And we were all experience. We all knew what that language.

Marlin Detweiler:
Can you give us an example that might help? Take it out of the abstract?

Mandi Gerth:
Sure. So one example would be when you're reading Silver Chair and Aslan tells Jill to remember the signs. Remember the signs. Remember the signs. Well that's common language. So they now start to understand what that phrase means in the context of that book. And then if you bring that phrase to them in a different context they're going to understand the idea and apply it to a new situation.

So they'll be able to think like, well, Mrs. Garth is saying, remember the signs, remember the signs, remember the signs. She's not actually asking me to recall the same signs that Jill had to recall before she went to sleep at night. She's asking me to do something I don't necessarily want to do and I might not understand why I have to do it but she's asking me to go, to obey, to submit to something and to realize that there's value in the repetition. And I'm being prepared for something later.

What is “Liturgy” in Education?

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay. Very good. The idea, you use a phrase, liturgical practices again in educational settings, whether it's at home or in a classroom. What do you mean by that? And do keep in mind, as I'm sure you would, the term liturgy is pretty well understood by the Episcopalians among us and the Anglicans and quite quite a bit.

So Lutherans and a little bit less so Presbyterians. And then there, you know, the Bible church people in the Southern Baptists and the Baptists are less liturgical, but you're using the term in a very broad way, I would imagine. What do you mean by it?

Mandi Gerth:
So I picked this idea up from James K. Smith's book You Are What You Love and he says that we are swimming in cultural liturgies or cultural practices that we don't understand are they have an effect on us? And what I started to see is that really what you could define liturgy by saying, I'm going to bring order to an event, a group event by sequencing things in a certain way.

And tailoring the environment a little bit because yeah I yeah like you're going to you're going to structure the environment a certain way. You're going to put things in a certain order. You're going to ask people to do things together. And all of those things are communicating to the people present what the values what the shared values are.

So if you think through like even just a football game you can go to a football game and you can see there are places where certain the parents sit here, the students sit here, the drill line sits here, the band sits there like everybody's got a place to sit and everybody knows when they're supposed to stand and when they're supposed to, you know, respond to the cheerleaders or when we all know what we're supposed to do.

Marlin Detweiler:
Liturgy of football.

Mandi Gerth:
The liturgy of a football game. Yeah. So and the those things that we're going through are reinforcing values like we're giving a certain amount of deference to the flag when it's brought out on the field or giving a certain amount of deference to the football team or to the coaches or the like. There's a lot of values that we're sort of sharing through that experience.

So if you think about it that way then when you put some liturgical practices into your classroom what you're trying to tell your students are these are the things that I think are the most valuable about studying math or about this textbook or about this point in history. And I'm going to hold this thing up to you and I'm going to say this is worthy of our contemplation.

This is worthy of us pondering it together. This is important for us to put inside of us and to memorize. And therefore you are reinforcing those values. You're sort of giving your students an idea of these are the things that are important, and why are they important?

Marlin Detweiler:
How does the in in a homeschool setting this would not be the case but in a school setting your reigning in a host of parental styles into a singular setting. How does one get from the disparate nature of homes into a more homogenous environment that you can maintain appropriate controls on for an appropriate aroma and yet be able to really move the needle for what you're there for. And that is to create an educational environment that succeeds.

Mandi Gerth:
Yeah. So you will have students that come from lots of different denominational backgrounds. You'll have students who come with lots of different complexities and nuanced family culture. Right? So every the students will come with all of those different things. And what's helpful in my opinion about this is that you're starting to form a group that calls themselves a class and you're starting to form that class around some things that you all share and the reason why we want to share them is because the tradition has told us that these are valuable things worth preserving and passing on.

So I work right now at the University of Dallas and the Donald and Louise Cowan Center. And Louise Cowan has a great way of phrasing this when she says that like there's a sacred region of communal memory that teachers are the high priests of and that teachers are to bring their students into that region of memory where class exists and where noble deeds are recounted and relived and that that is something special that the teacher can do.

And so when we all go there, we care less about who plays football and who play soccer and who plays video games. And we care more about understanding what it felt like to be Achilles.

What Cultures Should We Create?

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, good that you've started to go into a place. I wanted to take the conversation so I'm going to ask you to expand it. But what classroom and homeschool cultures should be created? What are you finding? It can you, in simple terms, say, here's a list of three, four, eight, whatever cultures, and in the form of practices, I suppose, should be created.

What have you experienced? What have you interacted with others to reinforce and maybe even complement what you've been doing?

Mandi Gerth:
I think it's important that students learn how to say things in unison. So if you're if you have a number of students who are not used to that being part of their regular worship practice on a Sunday or any sort of community practice where they have to say something in unison, that's an important thing for us to pass on that we want to be able to say things together and to understand how the cadence of that works.

So that's one thing that I think these liturgies are very helpful to do. I also think it's helpful. I also think we should be creating cultures that know how to sing and know how to sing in harmony. So singing shouldn't be just a class that they take one day a week as a or one, you know?

Yeah, one day a week is a special, right? Like we just send that off to the music teacher. No, there should be music in our classrooms. And even the upper school should be able to sing. You sing before lunch, sing before dismissal. Like there are ways in which we should just be creating a culture that is more comfortable with doing things in unison with singing as part of life, and then some of the movement that we've lost, right?

Standing up together and sitting down together, just understanding that certain things are worthy of our allegiance or our attention or our devotion or contemplation. And so our bodies should reflect. We should change our posture in a way to communicate to everyone that this is worthy of attending. And I am respecting you and you and your involvement in this community.

And we're all standing together and we're giving each other do I guess do notice, do perspective.

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah, it's an interesting thing. As you're talking, I'm thinking about what in my church experience and setting, what we stand for, what we sit for. And in some church experiences, not much of mine. It doesn't happen much in a Presbyterian context, which is where I'm coming from. Some kneeling as well. And as you were talking, it made me ask the question, why do we stand?

Why do we kneel? You know, I get standing for the reading of the gospel as a practice in many Protestant church settings, but it's more than that, isn't it? It and talked to me a little bit, talked to us about what those practices, postures and beyond that communicate.

Mandi Gerth:
Well, there was a point in time where a gentleman would stand when the lady got up to leave the table.

Marlin Detweiler:
I want you to know there still is a time for that in some settings.

Mandi Gerth:
And there what I saw there or. I've been at schools before where I've been make I've been doing an observation and I walk in the classroom and I'm the visitor. And the class stands and they turn and they look at me and they say, you know, good morning, Mrs. Gerth and I'm allowed to say good morning back to them.

And then the teacher tells them that they can sit again. So those are sorts of things that just they're their manners and manners that communicate a certain amount of just seeing each other in a certain way and wanting to interact with each other in a certain way. That just communicates respect and an understanding of who you are, and it's just important, I think, to retain or to recover some of those things.

What Cultures Should We Avoid Creating?

Marlin Detweiler:
Yeah. Let's flip this. What are some cultures to be avoided?

Mandi Gerth:
Right. So one of the things that I think, I hope that bringing some more liturgical practices into the classroom will do well. It will address a couple different things. So I had written the book before I had read Jonathan Heights Anxious Generation. And as I was reading that, I kept, I learned a lot of things, but like about page 300 or so, he starts to really talk about how we have some spiritual problems that have surfaced as the rise of iPhones have taken over childhood and he tells us that he's an atheist.

So he's not trying to prescribe a certain spiritual way of life. He's just identifying that we have some spiritual poverty going on.

Marlin Detweiler:
He sees behavioral problems that can become cancerous in significant ways.

Mandi Gerth:
Sure. Yeah. And so one of the things he says in there is something very close to saying like if we could recover in our communities these ritual practices that build community that are embodied that would help our children. And I was like, yes, yes it would. And so this is one of those things that I think we can do.

And it's not overly complex and it's not very difficult for a teacher just to say, okay, we're going to put these three things at the beginning of every literature lesson. And when I ask you this question, this is what you're going to say back to me, and you will be standing when you do it. And then we're going to recite this poem together.

And here are the motions I want you to memorize. And then here's this. Here's the quick little song we're going to sing before. And then you will know that it is time to sit down. There are just little things that we can do that sort of help them understand. These are songs that are worth remembering. These are poems that have beautiful language and glorious ideas.

And then here in this quick little call in response, I'm going to tell you why I think it's important that we study math or why we were reading literature or what was significant about this period in American history. And so it's to me it's slightly different than just pouncing on the grammar school child's ability to memorize things and give them lots of things to memorize.

You are doing that. You were giving them things to memorize, but you're doing it in such a way that they start to realize like there's something ceremonially significant going on here. This isn't just me trying to memorize something for a grade that I'm going to have to get up in front of the class and recite later. This is something we're all just doing together because of the way that it forms us.

How to Avoid Repetition Becoming Meaningless

Marlin Detweiler:
Okay, so I understand that. And yet what I would say is we do something one time, we hear it, we listen to it, we communicate it, we do it. Our 10th time, it's starting to have a little bit of a deteriorating effect. How do you avoid such an impact on a young child? How does it remain fresh and good and meaningful in the context of what could be a significant repetition?

Mandi Gerth:
So one of the things that I think is helpful here is to consider like the Anglican Church in the Book of Common Prayer. So Holy Communion is the same service every Sunday, but the conflict changes and the epistle reading changes and the gospel reading changes and the hymns change. But the liturgy in terms of like what goes when and how I'm supposed to be interacting with the texts.

Marlin Detweiler:
The predictability.

Mandi Gerth:
Yeah, the predictability is there, but things change based upon what needs to be done that day or where we are in the church calendar. So I would suggest teachers should approach it like that. So you can decide my liturgy before literature will have a call and response. It will have a poem and it will have a song.

And once you feel like it's time to move from a winter song to a spring song or a winter poem to a spring poem, you can just swap that out. You can just put a different poem in there. So I used to I think that first fifth grade classroom, they had memorized 8 to 10 poems by the end of the year and we only met two days a week.

Yeah. And so we had a poem that we would recite when we were reading Caddy Woodlawn. We would have a poem that we would recite when we were reading Roll of Thunder, hear my cry. So I was trying to tie the cultural artifact, the thing that sort of said like here are the noble ideas in Caddy Woodlawn and here's this thing for you to contemplate.

And it would just change. But so yes. But I also think that there's something very valuable about the repetition because when you do things over and over again, not only does it become part of their memory, but it also reminds them that they're not doing this because it's easy or convenient or fun. There's that's what we talked about earlier about how the cultural practices form us.

There's a formation going on. And so we want our students to understand that formation is important is an important part of the liturgy. Not that they can just say like yeah, I'm tired of this poem. Let's swap it out. You know like they're not going to direct that part of the liturgy. We're the teacher is going to decide now is the time to change from a winter poem to a spring poem.

Marlin Detweiler:
Now one of the pushbacks that seems to be a distinctly American idea is the rugged individualism that permeates our culture, our thinking. Where does that autonomy and that individualism fit into this process or why doesn't it?

Mandi Gerth:
Right. Well, I like to say that one of the things that's very essential for our students in classical education to understand is that they need to remember that they're not the most important person in the room. So when I had a family of lots of little children, this was an easier lesson for me to teach my own children in my kitchen because somebody had to wait because mom was still busy with the baby or somebody had to wait because the food wasn't ready yet. Like there were natural rhythms to our home life that taught my kids like I can't just come in and make demands. Like I have to understand what's going on. And I have to realize that I. I'm not the most important person right now. The baby is right.

Marlin Detweiler:
It varies. It varies based on circumstance. There's a time in which that child is, but it's not every moment.

Mandi Gerth:
Correct. Yeah. And so it's important for us in the classroom to also help our students understand like they can't just walk in and say well because it's my birthday today everybody needs to give me treats and I don't have to obey any of the rules and I don't have to turn in my homework. And right that's not growing them in virtue and it's not pushing them towards any sort of mature way to interact with a community.

Right. So there are ways in which structuring your classroom this way and asking your students to walk through a liturgy also helps them understand that I'm not the most important person. Like maybe I don't want to do this right now, but I'm going to do it anyways because it's good for all of us for me to do it.

Marlin Detweiler:
There's an element of being a I think in sports metaphors there's a team player mentality and understanding role and timing.

Mandi Gerth:
Yes, yes. So I recently just had the ability to connect with a couple of students who are now seniors but were in that first fifth grade classroom. And they said to me like I still remember a captain, my captain, and I still remember the Gettysburg Address. And when those things came up later in my school like junior year and senior year, I was like I was prepared and I was connected to the I was connected already because I had this inside of me. So that's just sort of a beautiful thing that can happen when we do this.

Marlin Detweiler:
Thank you. Give us the full book name. I can't remember. I didn't write down the subtitles. So give us the full name of your book again.

Mandi Gerth:
It's Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom. It's available from CiCE Press.

Marlin Detweiler:
Thank you. Mandi, thank you so much for joining us. And folks, thank you for joining us on this episode of Veritas Vox. We look forward to seeing you next time.

Mandi Gerth:
Thank you.