Authors Note: Since winning my Top Ten Teacher in Fort Worth award, I've been thinking of ways to incorporate education into my writing topics. This is my idea for a newsletter for classical education. I hope you enjoy it, and let me know if you'd like more, or need a speaker for your school's professional development.

Let’s review some classical definitions of temperance…

From Plato: “order and mastery over the passions… letting the simple and moderate desires, pleasures and pains, be accompanied by intelligence and right opinion.” Republic, Book IV, 430e + 431c

From Aristotle: “a habit of stable character that has us consistently choose to act according to the principles we know to be true.” Nicomachean Ethics Bk III

From Thomas Aquinas: Temperance is pursuing the correct loves, and avoiding the correct evils. Summa Theologica, II-II, Q141, A3

It’s popular to think of temperance only as the thing that counters our love towards things we shouldn’t desire. That’s not wrong, but it doesn’t really apply to the life of an educator.

There’s more to temperance though…

The Greeks and Medievals knew that people have two classes of emotion:

• “Feel good” emotions that make us want, desire, or love something (the concupiscent emotions)

• Negative emotions that make us angry and frustrated. These make us hate and avoid certain things (the irascible emotions)

Temperance tempers both kinds. I think teachers and administrators need temperance every day at school, as a counter to our daily frustrations and annoyances, our irascible emotions.

So much of teaching is working through frustration, even anger. And we can do that thanks to temperance.

How often do we need to look mercifully past a student’s foibles? When a student is frustrated, we turn it into a teaching moment instead of a shouting match, and that’s thanks to the virtue of temperance.

I know we all feel frustrated explaining a concept countless times over, explaining details (that are excruciatingly obvious to us) to students who just aren’t getting it. But a student asked sincerely for an explanation, so you know they need to hear it, and will probably need it once more for the knowledge to stick.

So we put our frustration (maybe even anger) aside, so as not to punish asking questions, and work out an example for the “umpteenth time”. It’s temperance that allows us to shelve our frustration, annoyance, impatience, even anger, so that we may turn away all folly and wrath in our classroom, modeling the wisdom of Proverbs:

"Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly… A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.” (Proverbs 14:29 + Proverbs 15:1)

I’m a science teacher, and my PhD dissertation was neuroscience-adjacent, so I want to connect temperance to science.

Authentic science is full of frustrations. Our hypothesis can be wrong, but it may be days, months, even years before we know. Lots of research ends with a “null finding”; discovering there’s no effect where you expected to find one. Science is full of frustrations, which is why a great scientist needs great temperance.

Take Johannes Kepler’s decade-long struggle to understand the orbit of Mars in his work Astronomia nova—published in 1609. Astronomers up to that point insisted all orbits must be perfect circles.

But Mars simply would not fit into a perfect circle, and Kepler would know better than anyone; he tried fitting the Martian orbit into every conceivable circle.

None of them matched the data.

Kepler describes this time of failed circles and modified geocentric models as “a shipwreck of my labors”, when he “chased shadows and phantoms”.

Try to imagine how frustrating these years of work must've been for Johannes. Imagine the anger and despair felt after tossing out dozens of models.

The frustration must’ve been immense. Kepler had to temper his emotions for years before he solved the problem.

But when he finally did, it was an incredible scientific achievement. By the end of his journey to understand the orbit of Mars, Kepler had published the first two equations of what we now call Kepler’s Three Laws of Planetary Motion. Physics teachers will recognize these, because we still teach them today for calculating orbits of planets and satellites!

Ten years of temperance against frustration, anger, disappointment, and despair led to a discovery that’s still useful 416 years later. Monumental scientific discoveries of Kepler’s caliber require monumental temperance.

So, are we training our students to have temperance? Can they keep their emotions tempered long enough to spend years exploring the subject… or do they give up once the bell rings?

Kepler’s long journey to discovery highlights the need for virtues in science education. You might be surprised to learn that classical education and good science rely on many of the same virtues. Yet, many classical schools struggle to integrate science education to classical pedagogy and virtue formation.

Does your school understand the natural connection between the sciences and the classical virtues? Is your science classroom a place where virtues naturally grow?

Let’s close with some reflection questions concerning temperance.

Reflection Questions for Teachers and Admin

• Is your classroom/school a place where temperance comes naturally? Are you and your students able to consistently handle frustrations with grace, or is anger the norm?

• Do your students know how to handle frustrations in their studies?

• Could your students handle years of frustrations for the sake of a world-changing discovery? If not, how could you help them train for that?

• What kind of practices could you teach your students to grow them in temperance?

If this newsletter leaves you with any ideas or questions, please reach out! We love hearing from our readers.

☦️❤️🐍

My writing is made possible by my generous internet patrons, the Serpent Squad!

Thanks to:

• MakeitClaire