7th Grade at Cambridge: Stewardship Requires Virtue

By: Mike Bealefeld, 7th Grade Unit Teacher

We begin 7th grade with the major theme from 6th grade: imago dei. God created us, all of humanity, in His image and likeness. Like all classes at Cambridge, we begin with Creation, and we wrestle with what it means to steward well what God has designed. 

Here in the middle of the middle school experience, we seek to understand what it means to steward ideas well. God asks Adam and Eve to rule and to reign (Genesis 1:28), trusting in His wisdom along the way. A foundational idea of Cambridge is that faith and reason are workmates. Both are gifts of God, yet reason must be in the service of faith.

Mr. B presents wearing his reenactment uniform.

God invites us to steward His creation with Him and develop societies and governments that uphold human value and dignity. It is through virtue, its classical and theological contexts, that we pursue true stewardship by lovingly working for the good of humanity and the rest of God’s handiwork.

It’s through the lens of the founding of the United States and its Constitution to the early Twentieth Century in America that we wrestle with the theme of stewardship. The founders proclaimed the ideal of “all men created equal” but more often failed to live it out. Yet, there were individuals throughout our nation’s history who lived virtuously and worked toward true equality.

Through primary source documents and works of literary greats, we explore real and fictional characters that faced huge challenges and tremendous adversity and brought about important changes. We’ll read A Horse and His Boy, the penultimate story in C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, along with a Choctaw tale by Tim Tingle in which a young boy navigates the harsh reality of the Trail of Tears. 

We’ll use the five elements of plot - plot, setting, theme, characterization, and point of view - to review the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. 

We enter the new year prepared to uncover an incomprehensible period of our history - antebellum slavery. We start with the voice of Frederick Douglass in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Douglass was a prominent abolitionist and leader in the African American community who boldly and directly refuted many pro-slavery arguments in his work. We pair Douglass with an abridged version of Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to add a woman’s voice to the conversation. 

We continue the year studying the Civil War Era, wrestling with big questions using sound reason and logical arguments.

Can war ever be just?

Is war sometimes necessary to combat great evil?

The 5-paragraph essay becomes a venue for argumentation and continued stewardship. We draft and edit thesis statements, identify fallacies, and focus on proper grammar and word choice. 

Field trips throughout the year take us from the local Hampton Historic Site where we’ll compare slave quarters to the mansion all the way to a bike tour and overnight camping trip in Gettysburg.

Our studies prepare us for a deep dive into the Twentieth Century and beyond as students enter their culminating year at Cambridge. The death toll of the Civil War offers a foretaste of the atrocities of World War II. The inspiration of Black Americans before, during, and after the Civil War inspire the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. 

7th grade is another step toward the Cambridge vision to prepare students to live out their God-given destinies in high school and beyond.