Teaching Fiction From the Inside Out is part of the Cana Academy’s teaching guides. While most of their publications focus on teaching individual works from Thucydides to Orwell, this book provides a more comprehensive guide to teaching fiction.

DeCelles-Zwerneman wishes teachers to teach fiction “from the inside out” because doing so enlarges the imaginations and hearts of students. The book is aimed at middle- and high-school teachers of fiction. Her emphasis on the enlargement of the imagination of teenagers comes with a strong recognition that children in that age group—no longer young children but not quite young adults—need a structured paideia of imagination that provides scaffolding for their budding reasoning capacities for abstract thought. DeCelles-Zwerneman cautions against the array of methods of teaching fiction that rationalize fiction at the expense of cultivating the imaginative world fiction creates. Rationalizing fiction undermines not just the student’s imaginative faculties but also their intellects. She provides a careful and psychologically subtle handbook for developing the imaginations and intellects—the hearts—of young students.

DeCelles-Zwerneman aims to recapture the teaching of literature from the professors of history, literary studies, ethics, politics, and psychology who treat literary artifacts as expressions of historical consciousness, of class or racial supremacy, or some other external criterion to understanding the literary artifact. She even cautions against reading fiction for its philosophical lessons. Understanding must come from within, and that comes through the imagination. The external criteria are all instances of a form of rationalism that short-circuits the blossoming of the imagination and ultimately undermines the development of intellect as well. Literature presents exemplars of human potential—both high and low—for the imagination to consider for human ends. Short-circuiting the imagination thereby deprives the opportunity for intellects to develop to understand and judge those ends.

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DeCelles-Zwerneman wears her philosophical understanding of teaching fiction lightly but imparts profound wisdom. The book emphasizes various practices to teach fiction, and describes various mistakes which I’m calling rationalizations. She counsels teachers to make fiction physically and sensually present to the students, through reading, hearing, smell, touch, and even taste. The effect of her argumentation is to inspire the reader, who is likely a teacher of fiction, to imagine how he or she would carry out those devices.

DeCelles-Zwerneman counsels teachers to “play the bard” by reading fiction aloud for students. By doing so, the teacher serves as an example to students for responding to fiction: “Students benefit from hearing their teachers read aloud to them to make the drama come alive, to summon the inventory and the passion of the story for their students, and to surround them with its sights and sounds. If properly prepared, a passage read aloud will increase the joy and glory of literature.” She counsels having students memorize passages as a way of building literary architecture in their imaginations. She means this in the literal sense because students should be able to imagine the physical spaces—the rooms, gardens, palaces, buildings—which provide the stage for fiction’s drama. Doing so gains access into the interior of fiction’s plot and the souls of the characters. Only when students are “inside” both plot and character will they be in position to ask probing questions about the drama, including characters’ motivations. Only then are their intellects prepared in both theoretical and practical ways to understand the drama in a deeper sense and to consider the action of the plot in terms of the human effort of seeking worthy human ends.

After offering guidance on how to read fiction imaginatively, DeCelles-Zwerneman turns to what to avoid. The main danger is short-circuiting the delicate support that the imagination provides for student intellects. Too much extraneous understanding of fiction undermines the learning process by substituting the enhanced imaginative awareness of the fictional artifact with various psychological, historical, and philosophical rationalizations.

The list of pedagogical practices that sap the imaginative life out of studying fiction is long, and most of them involve either dissecting works of literature into its parts or reducing them to some externally-imposed meaning. Such practices include treating literature as remnants of the author’s biography; psychoanalyzing characters (or the author); dressing up philosophy in literary dress (e.g., treating Dante’s Divine Comedy as an epiphenomenon of Thomism); character development as ethical decision-making theory; and mining the text for literary devices which reduces the literary artifact to the sum of its parts, as if dissecting corpse. DeCelles-Zwerneman mentions but does not dwell on more serious instances of pedagogical malpractice that reduce literature to expressions of particular ideology or expressions of class, racial, and other forms of prejudice. Whether these more grievous forms of malpractice are the result of the lesser forms of rationalization, both forms of malpractice simply fail to let literature be what it is.

DeCelles-Zwerneman cautions teachers to avoid these malpractices but that does not mean there is no truth to any of them. Literature cannot be reduced to biography, but literature is also the product of the concrete consciousness of the author. In producing the artifact, the author seeks communion with the unknown reader. We should avoid treating literature as a textbook for situational ethics, but literature plays a strong role in forming the students’ imaginations for life’s possibilities and in studying literature, students’ practical reason gets exercised: “Often, great art anticipates for us what is yet to come before we have arrived. It furnishes our memories with experiences we later encounter in our own lives, often beautifully anticipated and interpreted for us so that when we arrive, we sigh with relief, recognition, and comprehension of our present circumstances so well illuminated by the artifact.” DeCelles-Zwerneman does not want teachers to avoid questions of biography, literary devices, or philosophy. Rather, she counsels restraint and not hurrying to reach such questions, and discernment regarding their relevance. They can only be approached with an imagination enriched by life’s possibilities, and which provides scaffolding for the work of understanding. Short-circuiting this delicate balance impoverishes both the imaginations and intellects of students. Let students attend to those questions in college and university, if even then.

The enrichment of students’ souls through literature means also the expansion of those souls, to the world and to others: “Beautiful literature also binds us together—students and their teachers—through shared experiences of these stories and their richly drawn characters. As a matter of fact, these shared experiences bind us together as a culture and a people.” DeCelles-Zwerneman’s teaching epitomizes the classical pedagogy that sees virtue-friendship as the epitome of the good life. Aristotle characterizes this shared experience with a term he may have coined, “sunaisthesis,” or joint-attention. The blossoming of my humanity is in friendship with you, and in both of us while beholding the good together. Because my moral, imaginative, and intellectual capacities of knowing and acting in the world are fully functioning, and because this is pleasant, I should share the consciousness of those capacities with you, my friend. DeCelles-Zwerneman teaches us how we can impart this to young students by entering into the interiority of plot and characters, as if they are other selves whose world we learn to share.

Firth and Ehle seemed to have glimpsed this blossoming in their brief romance in the wake of their immersion in Austen’s world. DeCelles-Zwerneman shows teachers how the proper teaching of literature can cultivate habits oriented toward that blossoming, perhaps establishing a more sustained way of pursuing happiness.

John von Heyking is Associate Director and Professor at the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University, where he teaches courses in political philosophy. He is author of Comprehensive Judgment and Absolute Selflessness: Winston Churchill on Politics as Friendship (2018), The Form of Politics: Aristotle and Plato on Friendship (2016), and Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (2001). He has coedited numerous volumes including two volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin and, most recently, Friendship Studies: Politics and Practices Across Cultures (2024).

Yet, in the way Tawney presents the mathematics, couching it in a wealth of metaphors, analogies, diagrams, and images that bring it to life, the math-y-ness of the book fades as its real project sharpens into focus. Tawney fluidly mixes the formality of his subject with the lucidity of a practiced teacher, peppering his theorems and proofs with historical tidbits, interdisciplinary connections, and fascinating diversions. The principles of graph theory dance along the bridges of a sleepy Prussian town. The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic sprouts and blooms on the branches of factor trees. And the independence of the parallel postulate is digested by comparing and contrasting oranges, apples, and tangerines. Without ever compromising the dignity of his subject, Tawney’s prose is eminently readable, and his hyphenated phrases (“un-cross-multiplied”, “not-quite-fundamental”, “π-is-actually-a-number”, etc.) lend the mathematics just enough accessibility to welcome the reader into the conversation.

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Therein, I think, lies the genius of Tawney’s book: it beckons us anew to the discipline of mathematics both as a beautiful body of knowledge and as a participatory human endeavor. It is filled with mathematical content, but it incites the reader to action. It presents the discovery of mathematics, but it tells the stories of the creativity that spawned those discoveries. It describes mathematics as “objective, eternal, immaterial, and inexhaustible,” but it also describes mathematics as “effusive and communal…demand[ing] to be shared.” It proclaims that there are “standards of beauty in mathematics,” but it also asks us to develop our own “palate for mathematical beauty.” It is profoundly objective, yet it invites the subject-ivity of the reader. It is true, and it is beautiful. And in all this, it is thus a book that wages war for the nature of mathematics itself, carving out a courageous via media between those who would pigeonhole mathematics as tool merely to be used in the service of science and technology and those who would limit mathematics as just another form of individual or cultural expression. For Tawney, mathematics is more all-embracing than either of these reductions, a set of (capital-T) Truths that becomes animated and re-animated in new (lower-case t) truths as we ponder them.

At the core of the project, consider the way Tawney structures his book. He begins with “ten proofs everyone ought to know,” begging us to lend our human reason to the task of providing evidence for timeless truths. In this section, the beauty lies in the truth and in the argument, as the most fundamental formulas are verified by the most elegant evidence. Here, the combination of human participation and objective knowledge is at its fullest as math is both discovered and created. Yet Tawney continues with “ten theorems worth knowing, though the proofs are difficult,” showing that mathematical content knowledge is worth beholding and internalizing even when the human task of participation is impossible. Here, the beauty lies solely in the mathematics, as we marvel at the cosmological order that transcends linguistic description. Finally, Tawney concludes with “ten unsolved problems worth knowing,” inviting us to enter the inverse of the previous posture, namely that mathematics is a worthy human endeavor even when the content is (currently) unknowable. Here, the beauty lies in the enduring question being asked and in the creative attempts that humanity (and hopefully the reader) might make in pursuit of an answer.

Perhaps, then, the best word to describe Another Sort of Mathematics is ‘wondrous,’ in both primary senses of the word. It is full of the wonders that leave us awe-struck, objectively transcendental moments that leave us speechless, humbled by the depth of cosmological order. Yet, it is also full of the wonders that leave us puzzled, open and inviting questions that command creativity, effort, imagination, failure, and perseverance. Tawney leaves us stunned by Euler’s Identity, but we roll up our sleeves at his invitation to the Napkin Folding Problem. We are amazed at the beauty of the Fibonacci Numbers, and we are left with a page full of dots and lines after trying our hand at the Six-Person Party Theorem. We wonder at mathematics, both marveling in our spirits and marshalling our talents, exactly, I imagine, as Tawney intends us to do.

Tawney’s book is not without its flaws. In cherry-picking some of the flashiest bits of mathematics, it can ignore some of the subject’s inherent messiness, painting, at times, an overly one-dimensional picture of a multifaceted discipline. The book’s curricular chapter, while it does offer some excellent principles, similarly glosses over the thorny issues inherent in the act of textbook writing and usage, oversimplifying the project. And in Tawney’s (rightful) condemnation of our contemporary overemphasis on Algebra and applications, he leaves behind a few conspicuous holes, most notably in the domain of analysis, foregoing some of the calculus-adjacent beauties that would have been thematic.

In the end, however, the reader arrives to the conclusion of Another Sort of Mathematics having been funneled into the very posture that Tawney asks of us in his introduction: “Choose to wonder.” For Tawney, wondering at mathematics is a human choice, but it is one that we ought only to make having beheld mathematics in all its beauty and elegance. Perhaps more than anything else, then, Tawney’s book challenges the dangerous division between “math-people” and “non-math-people,” bringing new light to ancient wisdom and making “math-people” of us all.

Dr. Jonathan Gregg has a B.A. in Mathematics and English from Hillsdale College, an M.A. in Humanities from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in Mathematics Education from Michigan State University. For the past eleven years, he has taught in the Mathematics and Education departments at Hillsdale College, and he was recently given the Emily Daugherty Award for Teaching Excellence in the fall of 2024. Previously, he served as the Assistant Director of the Barney Charter School Initiative, and before that, he taught middle and high school mathematics in the Great Hearts charter school system. His most recent publication was the Archimedes Standards, a set of PreK-12 mathematics standards to replace the Common Core. He lives in Hillsdale with his wife, Casey, and their four children, Eliana (9), Simeon (6), Mattia (3), and Carinna (1)

I have to admit that I’ve been peeking behind-the-scenes on this book, waiting for it to come out, eager for Eben and Perrin to write a classical education version of The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher (2004), which was the teaching book I was given when I first started teaching in a classical school in 2004. When I began teaching more than twenty years ago, I had zero training. I had a phenomenal liberal arts education with a strong great books core, but no one told me how to plan a lesson, assess for virtue, promote the joy of learning (while balancing students’ inevitable obstinacy or unruliness). I attended professional development sessions, but what I longed for was a reference guide, something to keep beside me and remind why and how I was to teach in a way that aligned with classical education’s noble ideals.

In 2018 Carrie and I founded a Christian classical school and encountered the same absence of material. We showed our teachers Perrin’s video “The Eight Essential Principles of Classical Pedagogy” (2014), but we needed the principles written out to be meditated on and interacted with. We also wanted examples and practical tips. The Good Teacher is the book that every classical school teacher has always wished for. Through these now ten principles, Eben and Perrin walk, like Virgils ahead of us, explaining not only how to instruct students in goodness but also how to delight in goodness as a teacher. If you’ve ever wanted to be a great teacher, they advise you to start by being good.

Each chapter clarifies one of the ten principles drawing on literature, personal anecdotes, teacher stories, and concludes with illustrations for grammar school, logic school, and rhetoric school for how to apply these principles. As the authors continually insist, these are principles, not techniques. And, all of the principles are directed toward a common end—forming virtuous—or virtue-seeking—human beings. The authors remind us, “Teachers should help students… to order their lives and their loves beautifully—in other words, to cultivate virtue.” These virtues are moral, intellectual, civic, physical, and supernatural, and the liberal arts are the means of study toward those high ends, while principles of pedagogy are the teachers’ means toward instructing and delighting in those goods.

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While I recommend that every new classical school teacher read The Good Teacher and that classical schools purchase copies for new faculty, after two decades in classical education, I was still bolstered by the wisdom in this book. In the chapter Multum non multa, they quote John of Salisbury in his Metalogicon: “The ancients correctly reckoned that to ignore certain things constituted on of the marks of a good grammarian.” My teaching weakness is always to stuff my classes with all my favorite books, but I regularly lament having too little time for them. It feels like I’m flying through a room introducing students to the famed dead rather than allowing them time to sit over coffee and get to know Shakespeare or Wheatley well. I needed The Good Teacher’s reminders and encouragement.

The chapter on jingles, songs, and catechism was particularly delightful because I saw so many examples authored by veteran classical school teachers such as Carrie herself but also Jenny Wallis and Kyle Rapinchuk. What an example of tradition that we pass on the greatest books of the ages while also adding to it with our own voices! This chapter shows teachers the freedom in what Parker Palmer calls finding your teaching voice. Classical education is not a one-size fits all, but there is room for dynamic interaction and authentic innovation from within. Susan Wise Bauer has posited that we might better call what we’re doing “Neo-Classical Education,” and I think she’s right. This is “new” classical education, and the teacher illustrations and examples reveal how this old way opens space for new goods.

In our current culture, classical education is more needed than ever. On a recent episode of Ezra Klein’s podcast (May 13, 2025), he wondered whether “what we need to do is return to more classical education. Reading the great books” for students to be more humanized, more attentive, less alone. The conversation about education and AI was, in some ways, disheartening, for his interviewee could not specify exactly what teachers do. Rebecca Winthrop, director of Brookings Institute said, “Teachers do many, many things.” Her vague answer tried to attest to the necessity of relationship but centered on “skill development and knowledge transmission,” which she admitted could be substituted by technology. Substitution by AI is only possible when teaching is primarily a cognitive and transactional activity, rather than a holistic one. As I’ve said elsewhere, education is an apprenticeship in the tradition toward a contemplative life. AI is sidelined by such a definition of education.

In The Good Teacher the authors depict a promising picture of why teachers cannot be replaced by robots. When it comes to learning, students are apprentices. They are learning who they want to be. If we want our students to pursue virtue, the teacher must exemplify in his or her life these virtues. We have to instruct students in and cultivate delight in them for all the goods worthy of their love. “What we have loved, others will love, and we will teach them how,” Wordsworth wrote. The Good Teacher shows teachers more than how to teach well but also how to be good.