One of the Hillsdale College videographers looked around CLASSICAL this week and said, almost to himself, “This isn’t normal.”
Another crew member, after spending time in our classrooms, watching our students, and talking with our teachers, offered a different observation: “I think I’d enjoy working here myself.”
I have been thinking about those two comments ever since.
For the past three weeks, I have been sitting in on classes across both campuses. It has been a remarkable reminder of what we have built here. I have watched our teachers teach, questioned students alongside them, and seen again the depth of knowledge, preparation, dedication, and genuine affection for students that characterize our classrooms. We truly have some of the finest educators on our staff. Our students are serious about their studies, willing to persevere when the work becomes difficult, and increasingly capable of speaking with confidence and thoughtfulness about what they are learning.
So when a videography crew from Hillsdale College arrived Monday morning, I was grateful for the opportunity to see our school through their eyes.
Hillsdale’s K-12 Office is producing a flagship video intended to introduce families, educators, donors, and others to classical education in practice. Cincinnati Classical Academy was selected as one of the schools that will help tell that story. We are grateful for the opportunity, and especially grateful that the Hillsdale K-12 Office recognized the work of our faculty and students and chose our school to represent something of what classical education looks like when it is lived each day.
Over three days, the crew moved through Siebenthaler and Summit Park, filming arrivals, classrooms, recess, conversations, seminars, and the ordinary rhythms of school life. They watched teachers teach and students learn. They spoke with faculty members about why they teach and what they believe education is meant to accomplish. Mrs. Wilson, Mrs. DiCristoforo, Mr. Slonkosky, and Dr. Hoyda each sat for extended interviews. Middle school and upper school students were interviewed as well, giving the crew the opportunity to hear directly from those living this education.
They also joined us for our first lower school assembly of the year.
That morning, I had the privilege of congratulating our first virtue card recipients, students whose teachers had recognized them for living out one of the seven core virtues we seek to cultivate in every child. Then, more than 500 students and teachers stood together and sang the CLASSICAL alma mater. They swayed arm-in-arm as they sang, and for a few moments the entire room seemed to become one voice.
It was a simple moment, but it captured something important about our school.
One important purpose of a school is to form a community and to give young people something worthy of belonging to. We want our students to encounter the good, the true, and the beautiful in their studies, but also in the life they share with one another. We want them to learn that education is about the kind of people they are becoming.
The crew noticed these things.
Throughout the three days, they remarked on the relationships between teachers and students, the seriousness with which students approached their work, the way students interacted with one another, and the joy that seemed to run through the school. They noticed things that can be difficult to describe in a brochure: the greeting at the classroom door, the conversation in a hallway, the laughter at recess, the student willing to take a risk and answer a difficult question, the teacher who knows when to press a student and when to encourage him.
These are ordinary moments. They are also the moments from which a culture is made. That is why the filming meant more to me than simply having cameras in our buildings. After all, the cameras did not create anything. They arrived in the midst of something already underway.
For five years, our teachers, students, families, and leaders have been building CLASSICAL together. It has been built through teachers who know their subjects and love teaching them, through students who are learning to take their studies seriously, and through families who have entrusted their children to us.
I am grateful to every teacher who opened a classroom door this week to a stranger holding a camera and continued teaching as though nothing unusual were happening. Because nothing unusual was happening. This is what CLASSICAL does every day.
The cameras came looking for something worth capturing. They found teachers teaching, students thinking, friends singing, virtues being practiced, and a community learning to belong together.
The film crew came as guests. For three days, they became witnesses. What they witnessed is what we at CLASSICAL are privileged to see every day.
Torches Up!
Mr. Rose
Mr. Michael Rose, Head of School
“Before opening CLASSICAL in 2022, Mr. Rose spent 17 years in education as a middle school, high school, and college instructor. He has taught architecture, grammar, composition, literature, logic, and rhetoric. His academic formation reflects the interdisciplinary spirit of classical education itself. A frequent lecturer and writer, Mr. Rose is the author of The Art of Being Human (Angelico Press, 2023) and The Subversive Art of a Classical Education (Regnery, 2026). His essays and public commentary explore the relationship between beauty, truth, and human flourishing in the face of technological distraction and cultural fragmentation.” Read More