About
the Academy
Or: how a Christian family in Florida came to operate a classical preparatory school out of a converted dining room — and has kept at it for fifteen years.
Our Story
The phrase “Head of School” is used here in the most ornamental sense. The same person also takes out the trash.
The Academy began in two thousand eleven with a small frustration and a large library. The frustration was modern and familiar — too many screens, too few books, too much hurry, and a growing suspicion that an education built on the wisdom of the world was not quite the education we wanted for our children. The library had been accumulating for years and was beginning to look reproachfully at us from the shelves. We decided to put it to work.
In the first term we taught phonics, the names of the planets, and (by accident) a passable amount of Latin etymology. By the second we had added narration, copywork, Scripture memorization, nature study, and the regrettable discovery that good chalk is hard to find. By the third we had given the whole enterprise a name and a crest, partly in jest and partly because we meant it.
Fifteen years later we still mean it. We mean it because we have come to believe that children — our children, anyway, and probably yours — flourish in the presence of beauty, slowness, attention, the Word of God, and adults who are themselves still learning.
We mean it because, fifteen years on, the work has begun to bear visible fruit. Our eldest matriculated to her university and graduated summa cum laude. The children who follow her are well on their way.
Maxey Academy is a working homeschool that takes itself just seriously enough — and the Lord Jesus Christ, considerably more so.
Our Philosophy
Five convictions about how to teach, why to teach, and where (we hope) it leads.
Christ-centered, by conviction.
We teach as those who answer, in the end, to the Lord. Scripture is not a subject among many but the lens through which every subject is read. We try to teach as though the truth matters — because we believe it does, and because the One who is Truth made the world we are studying.
Classical, by choice.
The Trivium — Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric — is older than the United States and is likely to outlast it. It has produced statesmen, scientists, novelists, and theologians for two thousand years. We use it because it works.
Slow, but not lazy.
We move at the pace of comprehension. Mathematics is taught to mastery, not to a schedule. A poem worth reading is worth reading three times. The afternoon is for nature walks and the occasional unscheduled theological inquiry.
Curious, by habit.
Children are natural philosophers; the chief task of education is not to instill curiosity but to refrain from extinguishing it. We try, mostly successfully.
Joyful, on principle.
If the morning's lesson cannot survive a giggle, the lesson is at fault. We laugh in class. We argue in class. We are sometimes wrong, which we acknowledge as a teaching opportunity.
The Faculty
Faculty meetings are held in the kitchen, usually after the students have gone to sleep. Coffee is provided.
Faculty portrait pending
Head of School
Latin, Logic, Mathematics, Recess Supervision
Two decades in the trades of engineering and security. A reader since childhood; a teacher since unavoidable. Believes the work of fatherhood and the work of teaching are, in the end, the same work.
Faculty portrait pending
Dean of Letters
Reading, Writing, Nature Study, the Domestic Arts
The arbiter of what is worth reading aloud. A patient teacher of phonics. A vigorous defender of the read-aloud as a serious academic exercise. The one most often to whom small visitors confide their theological questions.
Faculty portrait pending
Visiting Lecturers
As required
Grandparents, librarians, pastors, the occasional friend with a useful trade — pressed into service for guest lectures on subjects we ourselves cannot adequately convey.
The Campus
We have no campus, which is to say, we have all of it.
The principal classroom is a sunny room with bookshelves. The auxiliary classrooms include the kitchen, the back porch, the local library, the beaches of Pinellas County, the Florida Aquarium, the Dunedin Public Library, the public lands of the state, and the entirety of Tampa Bay.
Field trips are not scheduled events. They are the natural consequence of asking serious questions about real things in a world that, we believe, was made.