#015 Gabriel Cheeley [Class of 2012]

Hello friends, 

And everyone else reading this too ;) It’s me, Gabriel Cheeley! You may remember me by my 8th grade comedy duo sketch in Logic class, “Chaos in Luftwaffenhavenshirebergville,” (possibly the high point of my scholastic career). Or my illustrious debate career where I almost won something a few times (hard to believe but true), usually alongside my main man Eric Walker. Perhaps you recall the time where I beat Sydney Lewis’ PSAT score? (Do I still hold the record? Did they change the scoring scale?) Maybe we hung out on Thursday mornings before school for Math Team. Maybe you carpooled with my unreasonably large family in our unreasonably high capacity van. Or maybe none of those things, but we still can relate; we’ve seen some similar things.

 

I’m reading through these letters and, by golly, I am so proud of y’alls’ writing skills. The bar is set so low these days for conversational prose, and you do hold yourselves to a high standard. Leave to Oaks kids to write multiple page posts extracurricularly.

 

I want to say a few things worth saying about my time at The Oaks. I want to praise where it’s due and indict where it’s due. If I do indict anyone, I want to do it in a way that the offenders could read what I write without disregarding it. That is so easy to do, but be warned: most of the time when you do that (yes, YOU, the offending or neutral reader! The second person is allowed! Soapbox #1), you are most likely committing the sin of ad hominem. 

 To give you brief context, I’ll outline my subjective chronological experience (feel free to skim or skip this):

 Kindergarten: The first time I visited before enrolling, I wore my favorite dinosaur sweatshirt, and felt odd and weirdly embarrassed that I was different from the kids in their jumpers and polo shirts. Once I was integrated, Mrs. Korver was wonderful, but she saw that I was a proficient reader and never seemed to let me read out loud as much as I wanted to. Cue a running theme

Grade 1:
Mrs. Holland. WTF is with class lasting the whole day? What do you mean I can’t have Ms. Korver teach me again? Regardless, Mrs. Holland was a great combo of disciplinarian and friend. She let me demonstrate my wolf howl in line to recess once. That was the last time I remember doing something silly without feeling embarrassed about it. 

Grade 2:

Ms. Allard. Coasted through the academic portion as far as I remember, but 6 year old me thought she was mean. And I had the best alliteration sentence in THE WHOLE CLASS one day. I saw her read my whiteboard and skip over me. Mark made many malicious monsters mingle mildly. One does not forget that.

Grade 3: Ms. Kennedy. Finally somebody recognizes my genius. I take some exam after

school one day and next thing I know I’m skipping the fourth grade. Once I was resting my eyes while the class was declining verbs and my older sister (shoutout to Natasha, a powerhouse, fearless woman, and natural leader, who started this whole conversation and is a prime example of someone who was criminally undervalued during her time at The Oaks. But I digress) ran in to pull me out of class. Second running theme - I vividly remember all the times the whole class laughed at me.

Grade 4: Sike, see above. Guess who doesn’t know much about medieval history other than

how to spell it?

Grade 5: Ms. Mewes Very rule oriented. Competent teacher. Once I had a late spelling

assignment but I scrambled and finished it before everyone turned theirs in. However, because my last name was early in the alphabet, I missed my slot to turn it in (because of course ten year-olds are doing everything by our assigned number), and she gave me an attention grabber and marked my grade down 30%. One does not forget. Also, I was in the same class as my older brother. 'Twas a tense situation. Unrelated, portables feature prominently in my education.

Grade 6: Mr. Fugitt? I don’t even remember. Bad year emotionally. Still in the portables. Subjected to traumatizing public humiliation after forgetting to get an attention grabber signed. I was publicly apologized to, several months after the fact, and a couple meetings where my father read the administrators and faculty the riot act. Thanks, Dad.

Grade 7: ALSO Mr. Fugitt??? I think we started having different teachers for different

subjects here. Things come to a head emotionally and tough decisions get made; keep reading.

Interim year not at The Oaks. I was doing ok in school but I couldn’t handle being in class with my brother, among other things, so I homeschooled for a year. I proceed to take up woodworking with a family friend. I read as much or as little as I want. I develop a lot as a person but I don’t see many people my age. I qualify for the National Spelling Bee! Free tickets to Washington DC, then I got eliminated in the first round. I feel like I’m the lowest achieving high achiever out there. I start to learn how to deal with being alone (as much as a 12 year-old can).

Grade 8: Things start going a lot better. I do well emotionally, or at least better. My

classmates do a pretty good job of not making me feel like I was held back a year. I remember being a huge ball of insecurities but I think that was the puberty talking. 

High school: It all blurs together. So many teachers, so many classes, and all the time I am

calculating what my final graduating GPA will be because I have this pipe dream of being valedictorian or salutatorian. I’m not exactly the cookie cutter poster child and I ended up with less than a 4.0, so that privilege was not for me. But hey, at least I’m the best at the PSAT. I skim a LOT of literature that was assigned for me to read. My college applications demonstrate my chronic lack of holistic perspective and real maturity. A high bar for a 16-17 year-old, but hey that’s what it takes to get into an Ivy League, which I did not do. Also, how did I get through high school without ever hearing about the Tulsa race massacre? We had a whole class on the 1900s. 

 In retrospect, man was that place full of itself. It really should not have surprised us when kids from other schools almost always beat us at any type of direct competition. It’s almost as if smart and talented kids are present all over the place, and The Oaks didn’t know how to leverage the strengths of the (by and large) beautiful and wonderful children under their charge. What do you think?

 

Thoughtfully implementing Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences (my psych 205 teacher would be proud) would have mitigated a lot of the insecurities that were fostered at The Oaks. Gardner lists and describes in detail no less than 8 (possibly 9) types of intelligence. Mathematical-Logical and Linguistic-Verbal are but two of them. And The Oaks worshipped (yes I said it), and probably still does worship at the altar of Mathematical-Logical and Linguistic-Verbal intelligence. Tell me how to get an A by leveraging your interpersonal abilities. How about your stellar visual-spatial intuition? You would have your time in the sun once a semester when a class project played to your strengths, and then it was back to struggling for B’s (Soapbox #2). I admit, I didn’t struggle for grades. I speak from observation

 

How about the kids with anxiety (or any neuro-atypical presentation, for that matter)? Oh man, the angriest I ever remember being at school (and believe me, I’ve been angry at school - just ask a certain teacher who forced me to call my father in front of the class regarding a late attention grabber. But I digress.) is when our rhetoric teacher forced a poor classmate with a very real case of GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder - a diagnosis I unofficially assess in retrospect) to stand mutely frozen in front of the class for nearly a full 55-minute class period, urging her to give a speech she wrote. But it was against the rules to advocate for the dignity of my classmate. I should have known the essential virtue of civil disobedience and walked out that day, and I think about that day often. Conformity is a hard habit to break. 

 

The ones that didn’t fit in just seemed to disappear. My graduating class was roughly half the size of my 8th grade class. Speaking of attrition (or would we call it culling?), I remember the verbiage that was relayed to me (I did not have the privilege of attending the meeting) when the principal recommended that my younger brother Augustin not re-enroll for the upcoming school year (this was AFTER an expulsion) because he just didn’t seem to be aligned with the views of the school. And yet re-enroll he did, and I have tremendous genuine respect for someone who graduates from a school out of stubbornness and love for his classmates. I suspect there would have been considerably more pushback if our parents were not also donors to the school in addition to paying full tuition for their several children enrolled there. But that’s hearsay and not admissible.

 

What was done well? Many things. I will call out Miss Nolan by name, who skillfully shared her love of math and could teach it to students of nearly any aptitude level. As I mentioned above, I am impressed by the writing skills I saw and see among my peers. I never had to worry about what I should wear on any given day (though God forbid your socks aren’t on the approved list. You know what, scratch that - the level of stress I underwent on days that I forgot a component of my formal uniform was borderline abusive. I promise, fat kids sometimes don't need a belt! Why demand it?). I will defend the teaching of Latin; if taught well, you can understand the structure of most languages and guess well at the meaning of many words you’ve never heard. Dr. Gore was also a gem, sharing wisdom beyond what we could process as young and inexperienced minds. Class field trips and science experiments remain as some of my favorite memories from those years.

Personally, I look back fondly at all the ways that my natural inquisitiveness was encouraged, especially in the sciences (shoutout Mr. Dykstra!). Through no virtue of my own, I was a mind that teachers appreciated; I was congenial (mostly), eager to participate in class (most would say TOO eager), and I would genuinely engage with whatever content was put before me. I got along well, and the times where I truly struggled were less related to my classroom performance and more related to my emotional development, which in retrospect, was behind the curve. How fortuitous that I wasn’t graded on that, don’t you think? But hey, at 26, I’m finally trying to learn to love myself, and I call that progress. 

 To all the aspiring future medical professionals out there: Hear me. I am getting my master’s in nursing (nearly done, yay for me!). I have applied to and been rejected from medical school (at the risk of sounding sour grapes-y, thank goodness). Medicine is a lot. It may make you a socialist. It contains a big chunk of the human experience, from birth to death with every bodily fluid liberally sprinkled in. Don’t go into it because it’s prestigious, or highly paid, or whatever. Go into it if you have a passion for understanding the great and marvelous human body, and an accompanying desire to restore people to health. And lots and lots (and LOTS) of patience. There are other, better paths if medicine is not for you.

 Moving right along, let’s take a look at the school’s mission statement and ancillary goals:

 “The Oaks partners with parents to raise classically educated young men and women who glorify Christ, shape culture, and shine the light of God's truth on all of life's endeavors.”

 “When you walk our hallways and sit in our classrooms, you will see teachers and students striving— however imperfectly—to practice the character traits of a healthy family: self-sacrifice, thankfulness, attentive listening, vibrant dialogue, repentence and forgiveness. When you join The Oaks family, you don’t get lost in the crowd.”

 “When Jesus asked his disciples, "What do you want?" (John 1:38), he cut decisively to the heart of the matter: their desire. He did not ask about their knowledge, but their love because he knew that we are ultimately what we love. "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matthew 6:21). We aim to raise up young men and women who love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.”

 

What does the institution advertise itself to do? Does it do a good job? Does it overreach what a school should do? What is it missing? Does it do other things than the mission statement suggests? Does it misspell the word repentance? To answer these questions would require a whole new post, but it’s worth considering. Overall I would give it a solid B-. Unweighted, of course. For the record, if I could snap my fingers and dissolve the school, I wouldn’t. 

 Oh man, I am having flashbacks to hearing Scripture quoted at me and feeling like it was out of context but knowing that arguing about it was a losing battle. A surefire way to sow the seeds of resenting Scripture is to tear a child down using Scripture. “Take your thoughts captive,” “Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks,” “You shall know a tree by its fruit,” “Run the race set before you,” “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” "kindness will heap burning coals on your enemy's head," ad nauseam. I could go on. The Bible was not made to be cut into aphorisms and thrown at children to make them feel bad (except maybe Proverbs). Stop it. (Soapbox #3)

The greatest and final indictment I will lay upon this school is that its faculty do not collectively know how to practice or teach loving and forgiving others to the students. Love is many things, and the most important thing, but it is hard to find in a draconian set of rules and a stressful course load that aims for perfection and does not gracefully accept failure (of grades or narrowly defined “good character”). It is not found in ostracizing diversity of perspective. Jesus did not reject the adulteress, he rejected the Pharisee. If you fail at practicing the first and greatest commandment while aggressively pursuing trivial ones, does that qualify as missing the forest for The Oak Trees? (Soapbox #4)

Writing with the love of Christ in my heart, 

Gabriel Cheeley 

(reachable at gdcheeley@gmail.com), Oaks Class of 2012

 

P.S. Maybe The Oaks should offer therapy to their students by default. Can’t hurt.

 

P.P.S. To the administration - critical feedback is an amazing opportunity to up your game. When you can identify your weaknesses, you have the opportunity to target them with laser focus. Think of this whole blog as a free system audit that a business consultant would charge tens of thousands of dollars for. There is definitely a Proverb that supports my point.