formality vs informality, aging?

[Ruralguy]

In some locations "Hon" as in short for "Honey" works, but increasingly less so, especially anywhere near a campus.

[apl68]

Random thoughts and responses:

1) WRT that guy in Iowa and his plan to potentially establish a Christian school in the RI area, when he and his folks get here to plant their church-- this guy is currently a teacher at a similar Christian school in IA and as such, he and his compadres know and love this particular strand of Christian ed ('classical Christian school'), and wish very much to be a part of such a school here.   They happened to see my longstanding ad on a classical Christian school website and decided to contact me to see what I knew and whether we might work together to establish such a school.   We still may well do so.

If they want to plant churches effectively, they would do well to concentrate on that goal and not let themselves be distracted by trying to set up a school.  A school has the potential to suck all the resources out of the church's mission work, and it might well still end up not being enough.  We had attempt here to start a church-supported school some years ago.  It was a ghastly fiasco that squandered scarce resources and left hard feelings that persist even now.  And left some of its (few) graduates in trouble farther down the line.  I know a young alumnus of that school who is currently signing up for GED courses because the school's failure of accreditation left him having serious problems applying for work.  His employer agreed to take him on only after he had agreed to work on his high school equivalency credentials.

[mamselle]

I, also know of three very good such schools that are struggling.

One is in a downtown urban area, and has a strong outreach to disadvantaged urban youth. Teaching and student work is strong, but the funds are not there.

One is in a suburban area where a number of private schools exist, and mostly thrive, although they're all having problems currently. A friend was the former headmaster of this school.

One is in a further-removed part of the state; another friend's wife teaches there and they've all had to take pay reductions, last I heard.

To say nothing of the many RC and other denominationally-affiliated private schools which, whatever flavor of faith they favor, often exist in an area where demographics keep declining, both in numbers of children overall, and in numbers of families with a faith affiliation to the school that will support it come heaven or high water.

Enthusiasm and expertise are great, but homeschooling options, with low overhead and smaller, more focused programs, are a better bet right now.

M.

[polly_mer]

Were I even thinking of starting a classical Christian education K-12 school anywhere, I would want solid answers to many questions on the nuts and bolts of the running of the school, not just the excitement of the material to be taught.  The more I think about it, then more I wonder if this would be an opportunity to work more than a full-time job for a couple years for essentially free and then being out of work again.

1) What is the demand for an in-person school in the geographic region?
    In other words, can you get 300 deposits of $100 to hold a place in a school that starts in 18 months?  If the answer is no after six months of advertising and beating the bushes, then the demand does not exist.  I'm estimating a need for 300 deposits to get a yield of 30-50 students based on other activities that everyone agrees is a great idea, but when the time comes to commit, the drop-off is astounding.

When I look online, I can find several online classical Christian schools available for a very reasonable price of $5-10k per year, depending on age of child.  The map of the Association of Classical Christian Schools shows several of these classical Christian schools already exist in the region of an easy drive of Providence, RI.

2) How will this school be funded?
Catholic parochial schools became much less financially viable when they converted from mostly being staffed by religious folk working for room and board to lay folk who expected middle class wages.  In several majority Catholic places in which I lived, the Catholic k-12 schools closed as the financially prudent thing to do for the parish, especially as the number of children declined.  Had we still been in SuperDinkyville, Blocky would have been in the Catholic school for 6-12 grades at a price of $5k per year plus the family commitment to attend mass and other events as a non-tithing family in the parish.  On the few sites I've checked this morning while researching the questions, total cost to educate one child appears to be about $15k for face-to-face schools with most good schools having a hefty endowment, fundraising, and external support so the cost to the families is only $5k or so. 

I don't think of Southern Baptists as having a tradition of parochial schools (i.e., already have a lot of money ready to flow to a new school and the expertise available to send people who know how to set up the school on the bureaucratic side to become self supporting), unlike the Catholics.  A quick web search right now does not turn up a vast fabulous network.  Thus, the follow up to question 1 is how many people would be willing to plunk down a thousand dollars to save their child's slot and then would be able to pony up $5-15k annually?  If that number isn't a good 250 slots, then you don't have much of a financial shot at getting this school off the ground as a good private school instead of a one-room schoolhouse that is short on everything and always scrambling.  People paying very little will put up with a lot of scrambling.  People paying a lot tend to yank kids quickly when the daily experience is not great.

3) What would families be expecting from this school/type of education?
I suspect the answer depends on what is really being offered. 

Some people might go all in on a very religious education that sets up the child to go to seminary as the step after HS or to be otherwise devoting oneself to a life of service (regular working class job with volunteer work, social worker, teacher, helpmeet to the person who graduates from seminary).  However, people who are that devoted probably have very definite ideas related to doctrine and thus, again, one might be forced to revisit how many people can and will pay a solid tuition to get exactly the religious education they want for their child to go to a set of particular seminaries and will then choose a brand-new school with no history and few connections to the appropriate place.  The one-room schoolhouse that is a bare-minimum literacy/numeracy with religious education for the 20-40 students at a time might make a go of it, but apl68 points out that that education is often not acceptable for anything outside the very small community of true believers.  Those folks may also claim to want a classical education for their children, but will be quite angry about how much book learning such an education entails.  I would not want to be the teacher trying to enforce the book learning in that situation.

A classical education is far from dead.  Many fine schools exist that provide a true classical education that centered around the quadrivium and trivium (note that science and math are the majority of those 7 parts).  The demand question becomes why someone who values that kind of education and can afford to send their children to a good, established school would pick a new start-up school.  The funding issue comes in as is this new school hiring the best of the best of the graduates from excellent classical education institutions and paying for that expertise.  That's not cheap and is now in the range of an excellent private school at $20k+/year.

Or is the school really going to be more like a one-room schoolhouse with 5-10 teachers who are knowledgable, but take a pittance because they are true believers?  Of those taking the pittance as true believers, how many have the connections to get the students into the desirable colleges etc. as the next step?  Few people will pay excellent money for a classical education that doesn't result in a solid middle class existence afterwards.  Even if the school is essentially free, then the question becomes why take an unknown school over one of the excellent Jesuit and similar schools with a substantial history of success that award substantial need-based financial aid?

In short, while classical education is a thing for which tens of thousands of parents pay, it's not clear that a brand-new school in a region with a long-standing tradition of fine education (i.e., many, many fine schools, some of which are already struggling as the K-12 population declines) is a great idea.  While Christian education in an essentially one-room schoolhouse is also a thing, it's not clear that starting a new Southern Baptist school in a region renowned for being Catholic is a good idea.

[mamselle]

If anything, American Baptist, not Southern Baptist, has a stronger hold in that area, since c. 1646 onwards.

M.

[kaysixteen]

A fascinating addendum to this thread came up for me yesterday-- I got an email from a Christian school headmaster, a Southerner, confirming an appt for a phone interview that had been made for me with him by a recruiter.   The letter started 'Hey Kay'.   I confess I have never received a professional email like this.   When I did talk with the guy today, he appeared to sound like he was in his late 30s, not much older.   Perhaps I am overthinking this, but I wondered how I was supposed to respond.   I had to email him back to confirm his letter, and then later today I had to send him a thank you email.  In both cases, I deferred to my training, and ingrained temperament, and began these emails 'Dear Sir'.   Somehow I wonder whether that response will make me look old and overly formal, but what was I supposed to write, 'Hey Dude'?

[ergative]

A fascinating addendum to this thread came up for me yesterday-- I got an email from a Christian school headmaster, a Southerner, confirming an appt for a phone interview that had been made for me with him by a recruiter.   The letter started 'Hey Kay'.   I confess I have never received a professional email like this.   When I did talk with the guy today, he appeared to sound like he was in his late 30s, not much older.   Perhaps I am overthinking this, but I wondered how I was supposed to respond.   I had to email him back to confirm his letter, and then later today I had to send him a thank you email.  In both cases, I deferred to my training, and ingrained temperament, and began these emails 'Dear Sir'.   Somehow I wonder whether that response will make me look old and overly formal, but what was I supposed to write, 'Hey Dude'?

Dear Headmaster Lastname?

[Hibush]

A fascinating addendum to this thread came up for me yesterday-- I got an email from a Christian school headmaster, a Southerner, confirming an appt for a phone interview that had been made for me with him by a recruiter.   The letter started 'Hey Kay'.   ... what was I supposed to write, 'Hey Dude'?

Not sure of the Southern tradition, but in the West the response to "Hey Kay" would probably be "Yo, Dude".

[Puget]

How did he sign it? If someone signs with their first name, I respond in kind, so I'd respond "Dear Fristname," or in less formal contexts "Hi Firstname"

I do think "Dear Sir" seems both overly formal and impersonal (like you don't know his name). Step 1 to getting a job you desire may be changing with the times and adjusting to show you can fit their culture, not sticking with the culture you prefer.

[Cheerful]

A fascinating addendum to this thread came up for me yesterday-- I got an email from a Christian school headmaster, a Southerner, confirming an appt for a phone interview that had been made for me with him by a recruiter.   The letter started 'Hey Kay'.   ... what was I supposed to write, 'Hey Dude'?

Not sure of the Southern tradition, but in the West the response to "Hey Kay" would probably be "Yo, Dude".

Another appropriately trendy response is "Sup, dude?"  If that doesn't get you the job, it's hopeless.

[Descartes]

A fascinating addendum to this thread came up for me yesterday-- I got an email from a Christian school headmaster, a Southerner, confirming an appt for a phone interview that had been made for me with him by a recruiter.   The letter started 'Hey Kay'.   I confess I have never received a professional email like this.   When I did talk with the guy today, he appeared to sound like he was in his late 30s, not much older.   Perhaps I am overthinking this, but I wondered how I was supposed to respond.   I had to email him back to confirm his letter, and then later today I had to send him a thank you email.  In both cases, I deferred to my training, and ingrained temperament, and began these emails 'Dear Sir'.   Somehow I wonder whether that response will make me look old and overly formal, but what was I supposed to write, 'Hey Dude'?

Eh, I'd do for something in between those two extremes:  "Good afternoon, Mr. Sixteen, I hope you are well."

[kaysixteen]

I clearly did not get serious consideration for the position, got the form reject from the headhunter firm today.

The conundrum I had wrt how to communicate, as a job applicant, with a guy who addressed a letter to me 'hey Kay'. is that the relationship between job seeker and job hirer is asymmetric.  He may well expect formality, deferential treatment, even as he treats me with informality and, let's face it, disrespect.   He was younger than I, maybe by upwards of 15 years, but I remained surprised by this level of informality, esp from a Southern 'classical Christian school' boss.  It really is depressing to have to psych out how to respond in situations where the old formal rules may or may not be expected-- now that I have been having Zoom interviews, for instance, there is also the issue of how to dress for 'em.   Unless specifically told not to do so, ahead of time, I am going to wear dress shirt and tie, because, I guess, even if I find that the guys interviewing me are wearing t-shirts, I am operating on the theory that it is better, more respectful, to dress professionally than to assume it's casual Friday, etc.  I may be old, but I am not going to presume to toss out standards of professionalism that used to be normative, esp in more conservative regions of the country (remember that New England, despite certain aspects of liberalism, has long had a rather deferential culture, and the South is, well, the South). 

Another thing that has crossed my mind as I have now batted 0-2, likely very soon to become 0-3, in the three interviews I had had with Southern Christian schools so far this year, is that it is entirely possible these people, all of whom were full of folks who were very 'South in the Mouth' accent-wise, could not really understand me so well, and/or figured their students might have that problem.   I am not at all sure what could be done about that.

[Kron3007]

I'm kind of surprised by this.  I am Canadian, and spent some time in the deep south.  While there, I found that they were much more likely to use titles (although it was often Mr/Dr/Miss/Mrs firstname), as well as sir/ma'am.  In fact, I picked up this habit while down there to help with my camoflauge. I know the deep south is different than the midwest and Canada is different than New England, but I would hjave supposed that the midwest would lean toward more formality than new England.  Learn something new everyday I guess...

What I have seen more and more often is letters that just avoid the issue entirely.  For example, I just got one yesterday that started with "Good Afternoon," and got down to business.  I don't really care and generally go with my first name, but I have noticed this trend becoming much more common around here.   

[kaysixteen]

The Midwest is actually much less formal than New England, largely because it lacks the Puritan heritage we have here, and the all-but inherited class structure that is a holdover from that time.   The Midwest was essentially a homogeneous culture from the get-go.   I would not expect as much formality, titles, etc., from a school in Iowa, but I would expect it from Georgia.   Which is why the 'Hey Kay' rather floored me.

I am also considering that I really may well sound almost incomprehensible to folks down there, or at least the adults may think I would be such to the children.   But there really ain't much I could do about that, shy of adopting a fake Southern accent.   Which would not be a good idea.

[spork]

The Midwest is actually much less formal than New England, largely because it lacks the Puritan heritage we have here, and the all-but inherited class structure that is a holdover from that time.   The Midwest was essentially a homogeneous culture from the get-go.   I would not expect as much formality, titles, etc., from a school in Iowa, but I would expect it from Georgia.   Which is why the 'Hey Kay' rather floored me.

I am also considering that I really may well sound almost incomprehensible to folks down there, or at least the adults may think I would be such to the children.   But there really ain't much I could do about that, shy of adopting a fake Southern accent.   Which would not be a good idea.

You're projecting. Use of "Hey Kay" as a form of address in official written communication is unprofessional. It has nothing to do with geographic region.