Piecing it all Together

Early risers began Tuesday on the California One-Week High School Summer Program with the 7:15 Mass in the extraordinary form, while others paid a visit to St. Patrick’s coffee shop. With strawberry matcha and vanilla lattes in hand, the students delighted in one another’s company and braced themselves for the prospect of being called to the blackboard to demonstrate one of Euclid’s propositions at the morning class.

In the classroom, discussion turned to the intricacies of Euclid’s logic and reflection on the symmetry of equality and division. Proposition 4, the side-angle-side postulate, invited students to consider what it truly means for two triangles to be the same, and how a single angle, flanked by equal sides, secures congruence. Proposition 9 demonstrated how to bisect any given angle by using Euclid’s first and fourth props and constructing a right-angled triangle to create two equal triangles, thus proving the angle bisected, while Proposition 10 showed how to find the exact midpoint of a line. Students spoke not only about the how of the constructions, but also about the why and the relationship between the props.

Afterward, it was time for the midday, ordinary form Mass in Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel. For lunch, everyone ate burgers and curly fries in St. Joseph’s Commons before returning to the classroom for their last class of the day, on selections from the writings of the pre-Socratic philosophers Empedocles, Democritus, and Epicurus. The philosophers cover topics such as the nature of the soul, the principle that being cannot come from or pass into non-being, and the theory of atoms and void as an explanation for the material world. Students worked to piece together the truths contained in the fragmented writings of these ancient thinkers.

Whether the students left the classroom in perfect agreement on the principles of reality, or not, their time in class had to come to an end for the day. This afternoon, they can look forward to another dance class, then Open-Mic Night this evening!

Check the Summer Program Blog tomorrow to get the details!

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