How to Train Students for Long-Term Success | Carrie Eben

On this episode of Anchored, Soren is joined by Carrie Eben, owner of Classical Eben, a classical consulting firm. Tune in to hear Soren and Carrie talk about the difficulties of starting a classical school and maintaining teacher motivation. They dive into how to train students for long-term success by beginning with the end in mind. Soren and Carrie conclude by discussing what a proper philosophy of assessment looks like. 

Today’s episode of Anchored is brought to you with support from America’s Christian Credit Union. Find out how ACCU can be the banking partner to your school or family by visiting americaschristiancu.com/CLT.

Transcript

Soren Schwab (CLT) (00:01.127)
Welcome back to the Anchored Podcast, the official podcast of the Classic Learning Test. My name is Soren Schwab, VP of Partnerships here at CLT, and today we're joined by Carrie Eben. For more than 22 years, Carrie has championed classical education in both the private school classrooms and the homeschool arenas, and passionately leads teachers and parents in the classical model of education. She researches, develops, and delivers customized workshops for administrators, teachers, and parents in both classical school.

and homeschool settings via classical even education consulting. Carrie holds a BSE in intermediate education from John Brown University and an MSED in curriculum and instruction from Oklahoma State University. She is currently a PhD student in the humanities at Faulkner University, a blue stocking in residence for the Society for Women of Letters, a Searcy Institute master teacher and an adjunct professor.

for Integrated Humanities at John Brown. And despite all this, she found time to join us today on Anchored Carry. So excited to have you.

Carrie Eben (01:07.302)
Oh, thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (01:10.471)
Yeah, I'm excited for our conversation. We're going to talk a lot about classical education, of course, but also assessment. And so I'm really excited. You're an expert in the field. Excited to hear your thoughts. But before we get into that, as always, I would like to hear a little bit about your own educational background. Tell us about growing up. Where did you grow up? What kind of schools did you attend?

Carrie Eben (01:31.758)
So I grew up in Long Beach, California, and Southern California, so it's LA County. And I actually started out in classical, it's not classical schools, private Christian schools. Classical schools didn't exist back then in my area. But my mom was very, she had worked in private Christian education.

And so I went K through six at small private Baptist schools. And then in junior high, I switched to a magnet school program that was in the inner city. So I was bused from my neighborhood into a different part of town. And then same with high school. I was in the PACE program at Long Beach Polytechnic High School.

something I always share. I went to school with Cameron Diaz and Snoop Dogg. So we were not, I mean, it was a huge high school. We were not in the same, they were, Cameron is a year older than me. Snoop Dogg was a couple, Calvin was two years older than me, but I do remember him on the premises, and not Cameron Diaz. So I think, but anyway, so that, that was my background and the

Soren Schwab (CLT) (02:31.597)
What?

Carrie Eben (02:54.486)
The high school program that I was in was really the best education that I could receive in my area during that time. And so I had access to a lot of advanced placement tests and was able to, you know, take as many of those as I wanted to. And but I really enjoyed learning. And I was, I know we're speaking about assessment, I was not a stellar standardized test taker.

but I loved to learn, I was a good student, so.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (03:27.795)
Wow, that is fascinating. And so you were a good student, you enjoyed education, but you didn't really know about classical education at that point. And so from there to...

Carrie Eben (03:39.398)
No, I didn't know about classical education. I knew that I loved learning and I knew that I loved to really dive deeper. And so I was one of those students that really just enjoyed the process. I enjoyed history. I enjoyed the classics. I wanted to be an art history major. I made, you know, I kind of assessed myself that the thing I was good at because I made a five on the art history AP that that's what I should be doing, you know.

because it was my highest score. But I just, you know, I was the kid that I would get study groups together and have people over at the house, even back in high school and would, I just enjoyed the process of learning and the whole process of education, which is why I became a teacher in the end.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (04:37.471)
I know you did something really, really difficult and that is to help found a school. And I've talked to some folks that have been involved in school foundings and they said it's really, really hard work. But it's probably also so incredibly edifying. And so you helped found Sager Classical Academy. So just tell us a little bit about the school, how long it's been open and where it's located.

Carrie Eben (05:06.798)
So I'm here in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, Northwest Arkansas, which is a little town. Half of it is in Oklahoma and half of it is in Arkansas. And so John Brown University is in this town right around the corner from my house. So if anybody knows where that is, that's kind of the location. Starting a classical school has been one of the hardest things I've ever.

tried to do in my life. And so, yeah, I'll tell you a little bit of the history. A friend of mine, Jessica Houghton Wilson, who lives in my town here is, she basically came to me one day and was like, I need a classical school here in Siloam in order for me to stay here. You know, my daughter is gonna be in, you know, first grade. I,

I don't wanna do public school, I want a classical school. So let's start one, I want you to run it. And I was doing classical homeschool at the time, I was working with Classical Conversations, and I was working in homeschooling my daughter, I had homeschooled both of my children through 12th grade. So that was kind of out of the question as far as me running it, but.

I did say, my husband and I did agree that we would be on a board and we would help because we believed passionately, both of us believe passionately in the mission of classical education and what it does to form human souls. And we just think it's the best form of Christian education. And so we joined on that mission. That was over five years ago. So we are entering our fifth year at Sager Classical Academy. We started with

49 students and gosh I can't remember how many teachers one two probably about five teachers and an administrative assistant and the board basically kind of took duties as a head of school almost for several months and then we found a head of school and now we are actually in the process of looking for a new head of school kind of for our next

step in growth. Our second year, we almost doubled in size and we just kept kind of, yeah, we kept expanding exponentially. We are now at 100 and close to 170 students and we now go K through 12. So we opened up a high school last year and it's hard. Running a classical school is expensive. There's a lot of things.

you know, as a teacher and then being on as a board member and making financial decisions and, you know, and also being on the board with parents, you know, sometimes I'm not a parent in the school, which I kind of feel glad about because I don't always have some of those hard decisions to make, but you know, parents who are on the board often have to make decisions that are not necessarily good for their own individual child. So.

Carrie Eben (03:40.81)
You know, there's just a lot of, yeah, a lot of hard things that go to, you know, you have to deal with conflict and can't make everybody happy. And, but I am very blessed to work with the board that we have. We're in the process of expanding. We just are bored because we're just getting too big to do what we need to do. So we're really excited to see what our future holds. But

Soren Schwab (CLT) (03:42.612)
Right.

Carrie Eben (04:07.838)
it's probably been one of the other, I think other than homeschooling and the personal growth that came from that, being on a board is bringing that personal growth. So as a leader, as a person, and just learning how to deal with all the politics and rotating parts. So it's been a blessing though.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (04:35.374)
Right, yeah, well, we're grateful that there are people like you that sacrifice much to do that. And one of my colleagues has visited Sager and it's just so impressed. And so we're excited that your school exists and I'm sure the families obviously are too. Now you have been involved in the teacher training and a lot of your consulting is teaching teachers, training teachers, mentoring teachers.

both at Sager, but also in other campuses. And so I want to think your brain on that a little bit. I mean, you are so good at what you do, but I also know that is not easy work. And so in particular, I'm kind of curious when you have a staff of teachers and some are young guns, right? They're the new teachers, maybe straight out of college or maybe with a few years of experience. And then you have some more veteran, right? Seasoned teachers. How do you navigate that?

And in particular, how do you motivate maybe more seasoned teachers to continue wanting to grow? And sometimes I think kind of the stereotype of the older teacher is like stuck in their ways and we don't want any change. How do you navigate that and continue to motivate teachers?

Carrie Eben (05:51.414)
Yeah, that was a great question. I've been thinking about this a lot and I was like, oh yeah, this is the heart of what I do. And so, you know, to begin with, I will say that, you know, new, new unseasoned teachers sometimes are easier to motivate than teachers who've been doing it a long time and that are stuck in their ways. So I would say, you know, the person that we look for at,

to teach at our school. Jessica and I did the hiring initially at first. And I will say some of our best teachers actually were not teachers from the classroom. They were veteran homeschool mothers and they have been some of our best teachers. They understand, really, I think they understand the classical, even though they wouldn't have considered themselves classical teachers.

there's so much overlap just naturally in homeschool education and classical education and kind of what you do there that they really understood and kind of understood the whole formative process of being a teacher and the importance of virtue. And we're not stuck in a process that they had learned in teacher education.

So I would say those are our best teachers, even our young teacher who's just excited and has the energy to do lots of things, they wanna read everything. Really the biggest struggle for those teachers, like brand new teachers, young teachers, probably classroom management. So that's kind of where we work there. For teachers, in order to motivate teachers who have been teaching a long time,

the kind of teacher that we're looking for, if they're in that position, usually, you know, they're coming to us to teach because they know that there is a different way, there's gotta be a better way. So they're actually, some of those veteran teachers are leaving the public school, leaving their situation because they want another option, they want another way. And so they are already asking the questions that we want them to ask.

Carrie Eben (08:07.158)
And so I think that's really important is to have teachers providing opportunities for them to ask the questions that you need them to because if they're not asking the questions and you're just telling them then they're really not ready to learn that you know you know about a different way of doing things and how doing things and how to kind of how to proceed and you know any teachers that we have had that are they kind of come in.

and want to replicate what they have done in a different setting, a public school setting, they usually just don't last very long. So because they're just not asking the right questions and we can see and sometimes it's hard to know until you get in the process, like you know, is it a good fit? Because they might be more about just kind of a way, a process of doing it and instead

Soren Schwab (CLT) (08:49.815)
All right.

Carrie Eben (09:05.934)
questioning about, you know, kind of attempting to educate a human soul. And, but I will say, uh, definitely, you know, it's trying to engage those, all the teachers, whether they're young or old into asking them kind of normative questions about, you know, what is the purpose of education? What does that mean? You know, educare means to lead out. I kind of always bring us back to what does

education mean. It means to be leading them to something, you know, different. And in Christian education, classical Christian education, it is drawing them closer to Christ, the Logos, the Word. And, you know, that's kind of the center of everything. It's not just getting, you know, learning facts and skills. It is also, you know, it is forming their virtues for all ages and stages.

you know, other life. So when we're asking, when we're asking those questions, when I can get teachers to think about those things and about their practices in the classroom, and if they're pointing to the right things that their students should be, you know, attending to, then I think that's, I hope, I hope that's the secret sauce, just having them evaluate, you know, what they're doing.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (10:32.107)
Yeah.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (10:37.822)
No, that's a good point. I guess if there's mutual agreement on the telos, then at least there's probably more of a likelihood that they're willing to continue to learn and willing to engage in training and professional development because you would agree on the end stage of what we want, I guess. So starting with mission, probably, and that there's mission alignment. So what do you, kind of on the nitty gritty things, you mentioned classroom management.

What are some of the errors, quote unquote, of weakness still, whether it's in the movement or with some of the teachers that you've trained at SAKE, or where you feel like, yeah, that's probably where we still need kind of most attention.

Carrie Eben (11:21.014)
Well, I think really just understanding, my biggest criticism of some classical schools is that they might be teaching Latin, they might be teaching the classics, they might be teaching all the classical things, but they're really not attending to the purpose, the telos of

of what they're doing, which is why I bring up, the purpose of education is for human soul formation. And so if, and this kind of goes with assessment, if you have to begin with the end in mind, like Stephen Covey says, and you have to know where you're going. So the end, at the end, we want...

to prepare our students for all ages and stages of their life. We want them to love. One of our mottos at Sager is to love, teaching our students to love what is worth loving. We want to help align them to love the good things, the truth, beauty, and goodness that there is in life. And so I think if classical schools need to always keep that as the center, not just all the bells and whistles, not just, you know, Latin is...

is a vehicle to help form those loves. The great books are vehicles to help form those loves. Grammar is a way to form the, you know, math. It's not, those are not ends of themselves. You know, they are all beautiful and good to learn. I mean, of course, their, you know, beauty is an end in itself, but we do have a, you know, a mission to that. It's not just to check off a box or to prepare for

college or to get a good grade in a class, it is really to form your soul and to make you, to help you be prepared as a human as you know when you leave that place. So it's, I think it's just making sure that, I think that's where we lose, we can sometimes lose sight in classical education that you know we're just going to be hard and we're going to be exceptional.

Carrie Eben (13:39.934)
just to be exceptional and we're going to be accelerated in math and read hard books, supposed to be above everybody else in elite. And that's not the reason why we do that. Now, I think by doing the classical model, that is our overarching model, all those wonderful things like when we put virtue at the top of that, that's the umbrella, our students are going to want to

read good books. They're going to want to assess who they are and be a better person. They're going to want to go out and work hard and get a good job and be good parents and students beyond the K through 12 classroom. But we've got to keep that as the goal. And I think all these things will be added unto you. So after that.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (14:33.958)
Right, that's fantastic. Well, let's switch gears a little bit. There are a few folks in the movement that I at least I can think of that have written and spoken extensively on the role of assessment. Our friend Brian Williams at Templeton is one of them. Think of Andrew Kern at Searcy. And then certainly you, Kerry, who I think is like special the last few years, you've really put...

put assessment to the forefront of the conversation, not about everything we do per se, right? And I think there's a lot of misunderstandings about assessment, and we're not necessarily talking standardized assessment. And so talk to us a little bit about the role of assessment in the educational process and maybe what some of the misunderstandings are about the nature and goal of good formative assessment.

Carrie Eben (15:22.678)
Well, thank you for even listing my name next to Brian Williams or Andrew Kern, because they're people I highly esteem. And I've learned a lot from, you know, I'm a student of Andrew Kern. You know, I'm a Searcy master teacher. So a lot of the things that I, you know, a lot of my thinking aligns with his thinking too. I, you know, with what I'm...

I've tried to do with assessment is, okay, now how do we actually do that well in the classroom? And how do, not just think about it differently, but how do we actually do that? And so I've had the opportunity to speak at SEL in pre-conferences and then teach other teachers at their schools, how can we look at assessment differently and how can we actually...

How can we live that out in the classroom and bring it practical? Because sometimes, going back to your last question, sometimes I think what classical education sometimes doesn't do is we have these big ideas, but how do we actually have this human floor? How do we do that day to day? So I think assessment is really part of that question. It's the end that we have in mind. So.

I think that we have to think about the nature of assessment and that assess, you could look at kind of the root word of assessment, acida re, the Latin root, which means to sit beside. And that was basically looked at, you know, when they were assessing taxes, you would have, you know, kind of a little group that would sit next to each other and assess, you know, what,

what amount of money somebody should pay. But if we look at that, you know, to sit a cedar as a sitting beside, that is really kind of the nature of assessment. It's somebody sitting next to somebody else in relationship, in conversation, to be able to help that person, the teacher asking the student, you know, some of those normative questions, you know, we try to have the teachers ask themselves those normative questions for their own teaching and how to be better.

Carrie Eben (17:36.406)
Well, then those teachers likewise need to be asking their students, you know, how can they be better? So, you know, there are three kinds of assessors, basically. You know, there's the, you have your mentor, which is what I'm talking about. That, that person who's asking you, that parent, that teacher, that coach, um, who is asked, who's kind of challenging you to think. Um, you also have peers who do that as well. And, but I think it really comes down to,

that self-assessment, that inner self-assessment, what does it take to get a person to have movement in their soul? Movement is something I've been contemplating a lot in nature. Movement is important to health, and when we move, everything else starts lining up. So I've been thinking about that as far as the nature of our soul when we are...

making those changes, what does it take to get a student to go, hmm, wow, that is something I need to think about, that's something different. And I think I need to move towards that good, towards that virtue. And so I think I'm really interested in seeing, how do we do that? How do we measure that?

This is something that it starts external, but it's really something internal. And it's very spiritual. And I think it is hard to assess, but I think there's ways that teachers can, in the classroom, do that. And just some practical ways that I help give, I give them a framework to look at. If you look at assessing facts, there's one way to assess facts. This is from Mortimer Adler's, three columns from his,

the PIDEA proposal and, you know, how do you assess facts? How do you assess skills and how do you assess ideas? And I think there are different paradigms that teachers can do that, you know, within the classroom. So those are kind of some of the things that I'm interested helping teachers explore and learn and how to do that, you know, within the context of their class.

Carrie Eben (19:56.494)
and the number of students that they have and the rules and regulations that they have at their school, their state, or even homeschool. I really started this with homeschool students when I was working with a homeschool counselor with Classical Conversations. And so we were helping parents, this kind of all came out of helping parents assess their own homeschool student and then put that on a transcript.

and how to translate that and then with all the, with the testing and things like that. And how do you give a grade to your own child that you have been working with daily, and then and not kind of, not kind of fragmenting their education, that formative education with just, how do you sum that up with a grade, all the things that you've done all year? So,

There's a lot of things to think about. I think it's kind of messy and its relationships are messy. So sometimes I think authentic education can be a little messy. At Sager Class School, we do narrative assessment based on facts, skills and ideas and virtues. So we don't give grades, we don't give percentages. We have a conversation with parents and students about their...

about where they are and it was hard at first to kind of make that transition for both teachers and parents but I think it's been worth it now. I think we've received a lot of positive feedback according to the Dean so haven't figured that out for upper school you know yet I think it's a little different but so I hope that answers starts to answer your question so.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (21:43.243)
Right.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (21:49.808)
It does, I mean, that's obviously, Kerry, you've written extensively on that. We could probably have a three hour conversation. But I think a few of the things you mentioned really resonated. And as a classical movement, I think a lot of people or listeners, they hear assessment and they just think about grades and they think about tests at the end, right? But what you're talking about is actually kind of rethinking assessment, the nature of assessment.

whatever you get at the end, because whatever you get at the end, you mentioned, you know, earlier in the other question that the end of classical education is different. So if then it's all about just the letter grade or the percentage or the test score at the end, then we're really missing the mark. And we're I think I think it was Brian Williams. It's like we're incentivizing vices and not virtues, right? If we're just looking at it that way. And so I love that you're. Yeah.

Carrie Eben (22:38.734)
Absolutely. Yeah. Do you want, I mean, do we want to train students to love a grade and just achieve, you know, a certain grade or do we want to teach them the love and the process of learning? And you know, our assessments have to match our purpose of education. And so.

that's something very important. Cindy McAllister, who kind of initially started this, the assessment speaking that we did with Classical Conversations, she had said that and brought that to mind that we have to make sure that we align. And so that's why I say, we have to, just like Stephen Covey, we have to begin with the end in mind. And that's the end. If that's...

what we're shooting for, we have to remember that daily. And it's easier said than done. I don't have all the answers, Sorin. I think about it a lot and I get stuck a lot. So I'm stuck a lot and we're trying different things, we're exploring different things about what's important and we'll see what we come up with. So it's a work in progress, I think for all of us.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (23:44.659)
Amen.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (24:01.246)
And like you said earlier, exactly. And it's different if you're at a home school, it's different if you're at a district school and the public school or some charter schools, right? I mean, you know, there's things that you have to handle differently, even legislatively. But the way I like to think about it is, you know, is the assessment should not get in the way, right, of the mission of the school. It should not get in the way of the end, right, that you mentioned. And I think too often it does.

And so the word that I've, you know, even before we started CLT, what we often heard was compromise, right? That sometimes it just feels like a compromise, right? That the, that whether it's the assessment, right? Whether it's a testing, it kind of gets in the way because it compromises all the things that we've been doing. And so I know we talk a lot about ideal states, right? But ideally that formative assessment should not, it should be a complement to what we're doing. And then the test at the end or the assessment at the end.

should point back to what we've been doing, right? And not being in conflict with it. But like you said, it's hard, it's sometimes easier said than done. And we talked a little bit before we started recording. I said, I know that standardized testing oftentimes gets in the way, right? And while CLT is not a perfect solution, we're trying to at least make an improvement to kind of the status quo. But I wanna ask you, Kerry, and I did talk to you, I think we have a good mutual friend, Dr. Albert Cheng.

from the University of Arkansas. As classical educators, I think sometimes we have trouble taking all these big lofty ideas about education, right, and the philosophical underpinnings of education and kind of bring them down kind of to a more practical or actionable level. Well, when we talk about assessment, how do we do that, right? And so you mentioned this movement

With Dr. Cheng, I talked about the effect of poetry on the soul. I mean, how can you possibly assess or measure some of these things that are truly special about classical education?

Carrie Eben (26:07.57)
Yeah, this is the tension in which we live. So tension, it's kind of both and struggle between one and the other standardized testing, like, like you said, one should point to the other when you're talking about trying to actually measure what happens in the soul, when we have we present poetry, who can see the wind?

to second graders, you know, the poem by Christina Rossetti and then teach about weather and what happens, you know, if we do that with a poem, what happens on their nature of learning about science versus a class who did not have a poem at the beginning. We're, you know, Albert is trying to, you know, he's asking those questions. We're partnering, we're the willing.

We're the willing-getting pigs at this point. But it's all edifying for the students, I will say, too, and the teachers. So what the teachers learned in that study that he did at our school, and he's written extensively about that. We did publish an article about that in the Consortium, Kepler's Journal, talking about that. And really, with the kind of the.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (27:08.228)
Hahaha

Carrie Eben (27:32.366)
through the lens of poetic knowledge. So poetic knowledge is something I'm really, really into. It's one of my favorite professional books right now. I have a very dog-eared copy with lots of notes on it. I'll probably end up writing my dissertation somehow to do with poetic knowledge. So this book by James Taylor, Poetic Knowledge, Recovery of Education.

that kind of was our lens to looking at this study and how do we look at what the beauty of a poem can do and looking at science a little differently in the eyes of beauty, of nature, in the effects of how students actually, what they did with that knowledge. And I know you've already talked to Albert about, we found that they were more attentive and it affected curiosity and really their love.

they're not really just their love of science, but also their love of poetry. Probably the biggest thing for me, the biggest marker that I thought made the biggest difference was the virtue of attention came. It was heightened. And so you have something that's beautiful, that's kind of inspired by beauty to learn, to learn about nature. There's something that happens within the soul that helps us.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (28:41.858)
Hmm.

Carrie Eben (28:55.166)
want to draw a little closer to virtue. So that we saw that, you know, Albert works his magic with all the testing parameters, which I think is great, but yeah, we tested for several of those markers. And for me, the thing that stood out most was attention, which is an intellectual virtue.

And so the students who had the poem before the science lesson were more attentive to nature and the wind around them than those who weren't. Their souls were just drawn a little bit closer because they had that connection with the beauty of that language. They saw the wind. You asked a student who had the poem, can you see the wind? And they were like, well, yes.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (29:30.67)
Hmm.

Carrie Eben (29:51.158)
you can see the wind. The ones who didn't, I mean technically you can't see the wind, but can you? You know, it depends on how are you seeing. And so it just gave them, you know, a different way of seeing, a different way of looking. Of course we can't see the wind, I mean scientifically, empirically we can't see the wind, but we can see the effects of the wind. And they were very attentive to that and I think that's important too.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (29:55.01)
Hahaha

Carrie Eben (30:19.358)
um address with a second grader you know to be able to uh pay attention to you know to those things so um i think it's fascinating you know i think we have to be careful not to measure something so much that we fragment it and pull it apart i think we always have to pull it back together the whole because you know there is a principle if you just keep measuring something you will destroy it so i learned that from

Soren Schwab (CLT) (30:37.666)
Good point.

Carrie Eben (30:46.978)
physics professor recently, you keep measuring something and you will you can just it'll be nothing you can measure it to its to its nothingness and so we have to remember to respect the whole and respect the whole person mind body mind body and soul so

Thanks for watching!

Soren Schwab (CLT) (31:09.33)
It is interesting though, when I had a conversation with Albert and what you're saying sounds very similar. I mean, the idea that, you know, the marketing of a school, right? And you at Sager as a board member, right? Like, how do we market our school? And I think even as classical schools, one of them are all victim to that, right? It's ultimately like, well, numbers speak. And so while this is not really the end that we have, but like if we have national merit scholars and high test scores and so many AP classes.

That's something that parents understand, right? And so many other things that we truly value and think are part of that, that lead us to that, tell us, we can't really measure. And so I think you're right, we have to be careful, but be able to communicate to parents that are probably increasingly also, quote unquote, the victim of our culture, right? And only ask in terms of, well, why would you do that? Why would you do poetry? What's the point of that? It's useless. To have some tangible...

Carrie Eben (31:59.33)
Thank you.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (32:07.082)
measurable data on some of the positive impact, I think is great for our movement if we do it obviously within reason.

Carrie Eben (32:14.442)
Yeah, I think you bring up a good point. Something that we're being challenged to do right now is to, we have to meet parents first. Like we talked about teachers and educators, you have to meet them where they are. But you also then have a whole other layer of you have to meet parents where they are. At Saker, I think we're seeing the movements and the souls of teachers, and we're beginning to see that maybe with parents.

And now we're starting to have competition in Arkansas. New schools are popping up. We have the Learns Act. And so people are wanting to get on the government money. And so now we have competition. Well, we're gonna have competition very soon in our neighborhood. And so we have to do, we have to keep finding ways to communicate with parents. And...

Soren Schwab (CLT) (32:52.418)
Mm-hmm.

Carrie Eben (33:08.514)
hopefully draw them out to the things that are beautiful and good, but we also have to meet them where they are and speak the language. Sometimes an assessment or a study like Albert does to be able to articulate that, I think is helpful in order to... It really just shows what, as classical educators know, it shows us what we already know. And standardized tests.

Carrie Eben (33:39.198)
you know, as prominent as the CLT and what it has to offer, you know, is important because it does speak to parents in that way. So again, it goes back to that tension of meeting people where they are, but also inspiring them to learn, to love the things that are worth loving, so.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (34:00.654)
Amen, Keri, amen. Well, this has been incredibly lightful. I so appreciate your sharing your expertise. I do, of course, have one more question, usually the most difficult one. If there is one book or one text that has impacted your life the most, maybe a book you come back to year after year, what would it be and why?

Carrie Eben (34:22.262)
Oh, well, I have my stack here, but it's really hard for me to do one. But I already mentioned Poetic Knowledge is the one I'm really into. It's kind of like what is right now. Poetic Knowledge is the one that I keep coming back to right now. Another book that I read later in life, actually just a few years ago is Fahrenheit 451, I think really is prophetic. So this would be like my, you know,

Poetic Knowledge would be kind of my professional nonfiction. Fahrenheit 451 is a book I keep going back to as far as fiction. So of just what we, of what can happen, you know, if we're not loving the right things. So and this is what, and there are some scary things that are actually like happening now that it's Ray Bradbury is, yeah.

is yeah it he was

Soren Schwab (CLT) (35:23.786)
when dystopia becomes reality, right? When the Babylon Bee returns into real life. And we know we're a little bit in trouble. So one of my favorite, I used to teach that book to my juniors, one of my absolute favorite. Well, thank you so much. Again, we're here with Kerry Eben, who's the owner of Classical Eben Education Consulting. If you need some help with teacher training and mentoring,

Carrie Eben (35:28.176)
Yes.

Soren Schwab (CLT) (35:51.958)
be sure to reach out to Carrie. She is wonderful and we're so grateful to have her on today. So Carrie, thank you so much for joining Anchor.

Carrie Eben (35:58.622)
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. I hope I can help out teachers wherever they are and edify them.