Sarah Brown

English Language Arts Teacher

Educational History

B.A. Literature, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL.

M.A. Liberal Arts, St John’s College, Annapolis, MD.

Why I choose to teach at Nova

At Nova, we give children a steady diet of some of the highest expressions of the human spirit.  I am proud of that. I have a decade of experience in private classical schools and it is a joy to share rich texts in this broader community.

By requiring broad learning, we give them their proper human inheritance and equip them to more fully appreciate our wondrous world.

We habituate them to a life of growth, a life where struggle and difficulty is considered a good part of living joyfully.

My own children flourish in ways that matter to me here. Thus as a Nova parent in my tenth year and now a Nova staff member, I can give back to a community that has nourished and nurtured our three children.

Favorite Books

Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War—-the ancient Greeks set conversation at the middle of their understanding of reality.  Their history is a conversation, their philosophy is a conversation, their theatre and poetry is a conversation.

Conversation requires characters and characters require reader buy-in, decision-making even loyalty.  I love introducing students to these conversations.

Favorite Art

Bernini’s sculpture “David”—not only is the sculpture impossibly lithe and buoyant as art in marble but it demonstrates an artist who by his imagination enters the world of this moment of courage in every detail of the work.  He gives a David full of life, brimming with capacity, engaged in the struggle. It is for me an image of the life of action.

Motto

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.

Favorite quotation

Courage then, said Socrates, is the ability to preserve one’s opinion of what is terrible.