Academics

August 10, 2023 2024-01-03 22:06

Academics

“The single most important thing that makes a society good, and just, and wise, and happy is education” - Dr. Peter Kreeft

Our Educational Plan

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.
-Saint Paul

Our Courses

Art

Music

History

Language Arts

Mathematics

Nature Studies

Physical Education/Dance

Religion

Truth

We value truth as the foundation of knowledge, fostering critical thinking skills, and nurturing students’ integrity, curiosity, and love of learning.

Beauty

We value beauty as an essential human experience, cultivating students’ appreciation for aesthetics, the arts, and creativity.

Goodness

Goodness is a vital aspect of students’ education, fostering integrity and a commitment to service and justice

At DMA we incorporate good stories and good books into our curriculum. These are just a few of the many compelling texts our students read.

Lower Grammar School (K-2)

Upper Grammar School (3-5)

Logic School (6-8)

Divine Mercy Academy uses a historically based curriculum, rooted in an understanding of the human person as a creature, created in the image and likeness of God. From this starting point, the curriculum presents history as a coherent story propelled by the human desire for God and God’s coming to meet, inflame and satisfy that desire in Christ.

This means placing special emphasis on the Greek, Roman, Jewish, and other ancient Near East cultures that make up the Western tradition. This understanding of the person as a creature provides a basis for exploring and appreciating these and other pre-Christian cultures in their own right, for seeking to understand them as they understood themselves.

But rooting history in the understanding of the human person as a creature with a natural desire for God also orients those cultures toward the coming of Christ, after which they are taken up, transformed, into a new Christian culture in which the deepest of human longings and the highest of human aspirations are met by a gift from God which surpasses all these. Other subjects such as literature, art, and music and even math and nature studies complement this understanding and deepen it. For instance, a class studying Greek culture in the Grammar stage might read and discuss stories from Greek mythology to think along with the Greeks ‘from the inside’. A class studying the Middle Ages in the Logic stage might learn Gregorian chant in music, or consider the symbolism of Gothic architecture in art or the symbolism of shapes in medieval stained glass in conjunction with their introduction to geometry.

The coming of Christ and the Church is central to history.

As Christ reconciles all things to himself, his Church and the culture to which it gives rise takes up and transforms all that is beautiful, good, and true in pre-Christian culture and becomes a decisive reference point for all world cultures thereafter. Understanding the human person as a creature and seeing all of history and all cultures as expressions of the human desire for God and as lived answers to ultimate human questions, students should learn to appreciate the great cultures of history on their own terms, seeking to understand them as they understood themselves and resisting the prejudice that equates the newest with the best.

However, they should understand history neither as a story of constant progress culminating in the present, nor as a series of disconnected events lying side by side in time, but as the story of the world’s anticipation of and longing for the truth and happiness revealed in Christ and the events his incarnation sets in motion.

They should therefore have a special understanding of those classical cultures—Greek, Jewish, Roman—which become ingredients of Christian culture. They should read those portions of the Bible that are contemporaneous with the historical period they are studying and appreciate the window that the Bible provides into the development of this history. And they should seek to understand the birth of modern culture as an event within Christianity, as simultaneously a development of Christian culture and a reaction against a Christian view of reality.

Students should thus come to understand American history as a chapter in this larger story.

American history should be studied in the same spirit of love for truth, goodness, and beauty that animates the rest of the curriculum, and American history and culture should therefore be viewed through the same lens as other historical cultures: as a lived answer to these fundamental human questions. American history should therefore form in students a love of their country and its ideals, but it should also encourage them to subject that love and those ideals to the still higher love for the truth of God and the human person revealed in Jesus Christ and through his Church. In this way, the study of history should prepare students to become both virtuous and responsible citizens and faithful Catholics and begin to equip them with the tools of discernment necessary to live deeply Catholic and deeply human lives amidst increasingly challenging times.

The study of history in these terms is central to “incorporating our students into the wisdom of two thousand years of Catholic thought, history, culture, and arts.”

Students are incorporated into the received wisdom of the Christian tradition in two ways: first, by understanding themselves as products and heirs of a culture which represents the deepest of human longings, the highest of human aspirations, and the most profound of human artistic and cultural achievements; and second, by making the desires and questions that have animated and propelled that history their own—Who am I? Who is God? How am I to live? What is goodness? What is truth?

The proper presentation of history should therefore further cultivate the art of questioning, as an expression of their innate desire for the happiness found in God.

The study of mathematics should instill in students an ever-increasing sense of wonder and awe at the profound way in which the world displays order, pattern and relation. Mathematics is studied not because it is first useful and then beautiful, but because it reveals the beautiful order inherent in the cosmos.

Mathematics stands in a unique position at the intersection of induction and deduction, and as it flowers, it enables the student not only to appreciate more deeply its own subject matter, but also every other discipline since it lends its own intelligibility to their study. This is readily apparent in logic and analytical reasoning, but is no less true for art, music, poetry, history, sports, experimental science, philosophy, and language.

Mathematics can engage all the senses, particularly in the early years, with the direct manipulation of simple objects that illustrate number and counting, similarity and difference, belonging and exclusion, progression, proportion, and representation. Along with this direct experience, students can be coached in observation and taught not only to recognize but to question the relationship of countable to uncountable, unity to plurality, and repetition to progression. They can gradually be introduced to ways in which we quantify the world by applying dimension, magnitude, duration, measure and rank, and also ways in which the world may be analyzed and modeled through mathematical representation, including geometric and algebraic expressions. To the extent possible, students can be encouraged to ‘construct mathematics’ (such as building Platonic solids) as well as work it out on paper, and come to understand that the symbolic writing of mathematics enables us to describe accurately and therefore to predict the outcomes of many real-world events.

The study of mathematics should emphasize its foundational contribution to aesthetics (the study of beauty).

A love of mathematics naturally leads not only to the development of analytical and critical reasoning skills, but deep creativity.

Most importantly, it fosters a sense of profound reverence for the cosmos and our place within it, and the infinite depth of intelligibility woven into creation. This love is a spontaneous response that arises when a child first discovers math in the world, and must be nourished so that the work of solving math problems does not become tedium. Puzzles, codes, riddles, games, and the direct observation and experience of mathematics in our world are important ways to keep the intrigue and enchantment of mathematics alive while building necessary skills.

The study of nature must be integrated into a comprehensive vision of reality as God’s creation. Otherwise, the human person who is at the foundation of the curriculum becomes unintelligible and the truth about him becomes a matter of private opinion.

The study of nature, therefore, begins from the presupposition that all of reality is God’s creation, though the implications of this are easily misunderstood. The act of creation is not an alternative to natural processes; nor is the doctrine of creation an alternative to natural explanations. The act of creation is not something done to the world since prior to creation there is nothing to act upon. The doctrine of creation, therefore, does not explain how the world came to be, but what the world is. And to treat nature as creation is not to confuse science with theology or to divert attention from nature to prove God’s existence, but to behold nature differently in a way that is at once deeper and more comprehensive, but no less rigorous, than modern scientific materialism.

It is to recognize that we do not arbitrarily impose meaning upon a meaningless material world, but that meaning is inherent in the world itself. It is reflected in a rational order that penetrates to the depths of the natural order and can be apprehended by reason.

It is to see the infinite generosity of God reflected in the mysterious uniqueness of every living thing.

It is to recognize that this mysterious uniqueness can never be exhaustively explained or understood and can only be fully appreciated through the eyes of love.

It is to recognize that what things are is not exhausted by how they work or how they came to be. Therefore, living things are wholes, irreducible to the interaction of their parts or the history of causes that produced them. They are wholes that transcend their parts. o It is to recognize that living things differ essentially from non-living machines because:

Unlike a machine that acquires its identity only at the end of a manufacturing process, living things have a nature, and therefore a unity, that precedes and guides their development. (This is partly what is meant by soul. It is also why a fetus is a person from the moment of conception and why it eventually matures into an adult: because it is already human.)

Unlike a machine, an organism is not a means to an end and its purpose is not imposed from the outside. An organism’s end or ‘good’ is internal to it and is that for the sake of which it develops and acts. Maturity and health are the ends for which organisms ordinarily develop and grow as they do.

Machines and other inanimate objects have an environment which surrounds them but is basically eternal to them. Living things have a world which they assimilate to themselves through metabolism and within which they move themselves and act. This world is not just the organism’s physical surroundings, but the whole order, including past, future, and other creatures, which makes up the organism’s ‘action space’. - Higher organisms are characterized by having a larger world in this comprehensive sense. Man has the largest world of all, since he can deliberate about his future, since his world includes God, and since he can respond to God’s call.

There is, therefore, an essential difference between the living and the non- living, between procreation and mechanical reproduction, between what is born and what is made. No aspect of the human body or of human biology is ever merely material or purely biological, but personal. All human biology is personal biology, the biology of persons.
It is to recognize that science alone, which is preoccupied with the causal history and mechanical aspects of the natural world, is not sufficient to understand what nature, living things, and human persons are. Philosophy and ultimately theology are also required.

The study of nature should train the student above all to see nature through the eyes of love and to respect its inner integrity.

This must be the foundation on which all further specialized study in the sciences is based. Coursework should emphasize the observation, classification and rendering of living things (as in a nature notebook). Students should consider the unique characteristics of different kinds of plants and animals and their ways of life, be able to recognize and appreciate the unique characteristics and classify them accordingly. They should understand what distinguishes human beings from other animals and the relation between human biology or morphology (e.g., upright posture, primacy of sight, opposable thumbs, etc.) and the uniquely human way of living. From the study of living wholes, students should then move to the study of their parts through the study of anatomy, physiology, and related disciplines. From this foundation, students should proceed through the relevant sub-disciplines in science—chemistry, geology, astronomy, etc., with special attention to how these various aspects of nature combine to make Earth a home suitable for life, but also in a way that prepares the student for the study of these subjects in high school. Students should have experience in both inductive and deductive methods and know the difference between them. Students should complete their study of nature at Divine Mercy Academy with a keen eye for nature, a deeper wonder and love for the natural world, a greater awe at the mystery of living things, and a deep appreciation of how the world, in providing a home fit for life, reflects the wisdom and generosity of its Creator.

The study of nature should train the student above all to see nature through the eyes of love and to respect its inner integrity.

Physical Education: A Catholic perspective

What role does the body play in our kids’ education? When in the Eucharistic prayer we hear: “And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said: “This is my body that is (broken) for you” (1 Cor 11:24), we wonder what is the role that our bodies play in our lives and if, like Jesus Christ, we are giving our bodies (or not), how, to whom and for what purpose.

Classical Catholic PE? Yes! Physical Education illuminated by the faith in Jesus Christ and in the teachings of our mother, the Church, completes the general education of our children.
It teaches them in a profound practical way, that their bodies are:
-a gift given by God, and
-a place where He lives and where He wishes to work.
In their bodies, kids are called to live the life of the Saints we have been called to be on earth. With their bodies kids are called to talk about the Gospel, they are called to live it, to defend it and to be His disciples, with all that this entails.

How? The methodology that we use is based in the comprehension that our bodies are sacred and that in them, the Holy Spirit can move with elegance, grace, flexibility, and beauty, if we open ourselves and allow Him to do so.
Anybody looking at us moving should long to be closer to God.

We educate the body by creating the space for the Spirit to emerge. We do this by opening our PE classes with prayer in movement. We use Classical dance techniques to enhance good posture, elegance and flexibility. By incorporating anatomy in the study of movement and introduce the idea of an inherent well-defined inner structure.
We dedicate the whole second trimester to Dance to teach different movement techniques and dance styles (square dances, circle dances, Viennese Waltz, Viennese Polka, Classical dance) that reveal to students the beauty of social dance with its cultural diversity, unified in the commonality that gracefulness, modesty and rhythm bring. We do not move or train to move for the sake of performance or competition, but for the sake of a personal discovery and encounter with He who made us beautiful, graceful, athletic, and desiring always more: God!

We also educate the body by fortifying it so that it can develop strength, stamina and achieve a better flexibility and coordination. The repetition and mastery of calisthenic sequences for example, becomes a must, especially for the older grades who benefit from it to form solid patterns of movement which they can dominate and upbeat with repetition and work. Training in Gymnastics helps the younger grades to develop the urgency of becoming strong and brave, ready to perform above their capacity, looking to follow instruction and achieve more.

The virtues of obedience, courage, discipline, self-control, teamwork, sacrifice, and responsibility, are fundamental in our PE classes.

Our program is age-appropriate, and year is divided in 3 units adapted to the age and level of each grade:

1st trimester: Anatomy in movement – Gymnastics (younger grades) and Calisthenics (older grades).
2nd trimester: Dance: creative movement (younger grades), circle and square dances (middle grades) and Viennese Waltz and Polka (older grades).
3rd trimester: Sports – Collaborative games.

We also train the students for 3 inter-grade competitions, one on each trimester to impulse competitiveness and fun:

1st trimester: Jump roping (regular and crisscross)
2nd trimester: Hula hooping
3rd trimester: Speed and stamina races

Finally, we offer an afterschool activity of Dance for 3rd-8th graders. This year’s first project is creating a Gallery of Living Statues where the students will portray archangels and their guardian angels and will take the opportunity to explore the amazing reality of these God sent companions.

After that we will prepare to do a Dance recital where the students will have the chance to create their own individual dances and a group dance too. In the Dance Troupe we practice and develop the habits of discipline, self-control, teamwork, sacrifice and responsibility, which are fundamental for children’s performance in all levels.

All that is good and true has proceeded from the Word and has its homing point in the incarnate God…

Hugo Rahner, S.J.

Religion at Divine Mercy Academy is not just one subject within the curriculum, but the key to its unity and integration. The cosmos is an ordered, unified whole because it is created in Christ “in whom all things hold together” (Col. 1:17).

Belief in God as our Father and the world as His beautiful and rational creation binds faith and reason, nature and culture, art and science, morality and reality into a coherent and integrated unity. This unified view reaches its summit in worship, which is the highest form of knowledge and thus the end and goal of true education. This understanding should be made explicit in religion as a subject, in the curriculum as a whole, and in the life of the school. Most of all it should be reflected in the Sacred Liturgy and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the source and summit of the school’s life. Religious education therefore has as its ultimate goal the life of prayer and a deep, reverent participation in God’s own life through the Sacrifice of the Mass.

“God is love” (1 Jn. 4:8).

This is at the heart of what it means to say that God is Trinity, a communion of persons. If God is the source of cosmic order, then that means love is at the root of this order, a key to its meaning, and essential to our meaning as persons. Students should come to a deeper understanding of the meaning of love, both divine and human. They should begin to understand that love is at the root of reality and what this implies for civilization and for the meaning of their own nature as embodied persons.Students should understand that God’s love in the Incarnation gives rise to a distinctive Christian civilization which is their birthright. Students should learn Scripture and be familiar with the treasures of Christian culture, art, architecture, music, literature, and great deeds, all of which give expression to a Catholic view of reality. Students should begin to learn the ‘symbolic language’ of these treasures and learn how to ‘read’ religious paintings and architecture. And they should understand how a true civilization of love reaches its summit in the Mass, where our desire for God is anticipated and surpassed by God’s love for us.

At Divine Mercy Academy we are especially aware of how the great teachings of our patron, Pope St. John Paul II, on the Theology of the Body are vital to our mission of forming disciples of Jesus Christ, who are made free to realize their full potential by living joyfully in accordance with the truth of our vocation to love.

Students should understand how the vocation to love informs our very meaning as persons, soul and body. The curriculum should reflect on how men and women live out this vocation differently in marriage, religious, and consecrated life. Upper school religion courses should therefore contemplate the ‘theology of the body’, not primarily from the point of view of ‘sex education’ or even sexual morality (though both of these remain important), but from the truth about the human person as a sexually differentiated unity of body and soul created in and for love. The goal here is not to moralize, but to provide students with a beautiful, more compelling vision of life and love that they can desire and appropriate as their own.

The study of religion should fulfill the role of basic catechesis, conveying what the Church teaches.

By approaching catechesis in light of a broader vision of God and the human person students are helped to understand not only what the church teaches but why this teaching is true. Students see what these teachings have to do with the basic questions of the human heart, how they matter to their lives, and how they have mattered in the lives of whole cultures.

- Saint Paul

Academics

Academics

Our Educational Plan

Our Courses

Art

Music

History

Language Arts

Mathematics

Nature Studies

Physical Education/Dance

Religion

Truth

Beauty

Goodness

Lower Grammar School (K-2)

Upper Grammar School (3-5)

Logic School (6-8)

Get the latest DMA news

About

Resources

Connect with us

Lower Grammar School (K-2)

Upper Grammar School (3-5)

Logic School (6-8)