Charlotte’s Heart for Teachers: 2015-16 Calendar Journal

For years young women from all over England would live with, eat with, laugh with, work with, and learn from Charlotte Mason. Charlotte believed that these teachers-in-training came to her, not just to learn to teach, but to learn to live.

And when they graduated from her two-year course, she gave each one a gift: a book, of course. The book was titled The Cloud of Witness. It was a collection of daily inspirational Scripture, poetry, and quotations centered around character traits that Charlotte wanted her teachers to continue to grow in.

You see, Charlotte realized that being a good teacher is as much about who you are as about what you know or what you do.

This year the new SCM 2015–16 School Year Calendar Journal focuses on Charlotte’s Heart for Teachers. It reflects her desire for us to continue to work on our own habits and character, because those are what can affect our attitudes toward teaching, toward learning, toward our students—toward life—as nothing else can.

Each month, July 2015 through June 2016, you’ll find an article that highlights some of Charlotte Mason’s thoughts on a particular habit of character:

• Sympathy
• Work
• Thanksgiving to God
• Gladness
• Overcoming Temptation
• Kindness
• Faith
• Gratitude to Others
• Humility
• Prayer
• Love

Plus, each month you will find special touches—like areas to jot down gentle reminders, prayer requests, and books you are reading.

The weekly two-page spread offers plenty of room to write your personal notes. And each week features a quote, poem, or Scripture passage taken from The Cloud of Witness selections.

The sturdy laminated cover, monthly divider tabs, year-at-a-glance calendar, monthly calendars, and looking-ahead thumbnail calendars will help you stay organized all year long, even as you keep your heart focused on what was important to Charlotte’s heart:

“To ‘endeavour ourselves’ to the daily effort of education, to live and act, think and speak before the children, so that they shall be hourly the better for all that we are, is harder, no doubt, than to make one enormous sacrifice” (Vol. 5, p. 156).

(A January–December 2016 calendar-year edition will be available later this year.)