Mr. William Michael

Mr. Michael opened the CLAA online in January 2009, after spending 10 years teaching in private preparatory schools, where he taught Latin, Greek, literature, world history, logic, rhetoric and philosophy. 

While teaching, he studied the history of education and collected textbooks (printed and electronic) from the 14th through 19th centuries.  Realizing the incredibly vast gulf that existed between what was done in the past and what was being done today, he began implementing methods and teaching content as it was taught by history's best schoolmasters.  The results were electrifying.  At the time, a collague wrote:

"Mr. Michael's courses are legendary. The magnitude of this man’s influence at our school reaches the level of a Hollywood drama. Like the inspirational characters from Dead Poets Society, The Emperor’s Club, and Coach Carter, Mr. Michael revolutionized the lives of young people.  In all of my years of teaching, I have never witnessed a teacher make such an extensive impact on students."    

The success, however, was not owed to Mr. Michael's genius but to his confidence in the wisdom of those pious teachers of the past who were themselves taught by masters and were part of an educational tradition that endured through centuries of Christian history.  Mr. Michael's classes grew wildly as at one school, where, taking over a typical boring modern Latin program, Latin enrollments increased from 12 students to well over 100...in a single year.  His debate courses were so popular that students gave up free periods and early dismissal privileges to attend the debates and hear Mr. Michael's intentionally puzzling sophistical presentations and student disputations--some attending the same class twice in the day. 

While all this was going on in the upper school classrooms, Mr. and Mrs. Michael watched as their eldest child, 8 year-old Jonathan, was already bored with available Christian study programs.  He had learned the Greek alphabet when he was 2, the Hebrew alphabet when he was 4 and learned the International Phonetic Alphabet when he was 7 and now sat with English Grammar workbooks that, in Mr. Michael's judgment, didn't even make sense and surely wouldn't help him with any real language or philosophical studies in the future.  They were nothing more than time-fillers, bound-up busy work good for nothing but checking off artificial standards and state-regulated minimum requirements.  Finally, after growing increasingly dissatisfied with the available options and realizing the importance of what was going on in his own upper school classes, Mr. Michael decided to accept the obvious challenge:  restore the true, historical, classical liberal arts. 

This project required that a number of false ideas about "classical education" be addressed, including the Dorothy Sayers movement, which was influential among Christian homeschoolers and even making its way into schools.  The "neo-classical" ideas were impressive to many Christian families who knew nothing of the history of liberal arts education, but not to those who did, and those familiar with the quality of instruction in the better preparatory schools.  (There are non-Christian preparatory schools providing a more rigorous education than many falsely-called "classical" schools will ever provide.)  Mr. Michael published a simple critical commentary on Sayers' ideas and that got everything started.  Within 2 years, over 1500 students were enrolled, from Alaska to Australia, and the CLAA was firmly established. 

Today, Mr. Michael continues to develop the program, restoring authentic classical studies using the authentic historical teaching materials to do so--only with the advantages modern students gain from available technologies.   In 2012, Mr. continues to work directly with parents and students through e-mail, online chats and events hosted on the CLAA property in NC.  

Courses taught:  Classical Grammar, Classical Reasoning, Classical Rhetoric, World Chronology, World Geography, Humanities, Petty School Reading, Petty School Arithmetic, Sewing and more.  

Mrs. Dania Michael

Mrs. Michael has been at work behing the scenes helping to support home schooling families using the CLAA since its beginning in 2009.  She has spent countless nights up past 1am chatting with mothers around the world.   Mrs. Michael takes care of homeschool support, helping homeschooling mothers to help their children succeed in the classical liberal arts.  She is available in the evenings for live chat support and is the preferred contact of almost all homeschool mothers.

Mrs. Michael studied Classics and Elementary Education at Rutgers University in New Jersey.  She completed her ungraduate studies in three years before starting in the Rutgers Graduate School of Education.  However, while there, she knew that she would never be interested in teaching in a public school and chose to begin work in a local inner-city Christian private school, teaching second grade.   She continued there until the birth of her first child neared in 2000.  Since then, she has been caring for her nine babies and home schooling, while also managing her share of the work on the Michael Family Farm.  Mrs. Michael loves working with animals (dairy cows, sheep, goats, horses) and is an excellent baker and cheese maker.  In 2012, Mrs. Michael is opening "Mrs. Michael's School for Christian Girls" which will teach traditional domestic arts to girls around the world.

Courses taught:  Homeschool Support, Sewing I 

Jared Haselbarth

Mr. Haselbarth has served as an academic dean at St. Charles Borromeo’s Graduate School of Theology for four years, where he helps direct and manage four academic programs of study. He holds an MA in Theology from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary and a BA in Theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville. He has taught at DeSales University and St. Charles Seminary and has also taught at the high school level. Since 2009, he has contributed to the development of the Classical Liberal Arts Academy (Monroe, NC) where he writes coursework on Art and Music History and creates audio/visual resources for families. These include the hymns of the Liturgy of the Hours and children’s prayers in song.

Mr. Haselbarth and his wife Laura are the parents of three young boys. Laura was educated and grew up in Lancaster, PA and Jared is originally from the Philadelphia area. They were married in 2007 in St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Lancaster, PA.

Courses taught:  Art History, Music History

Dr. Nathan Schmiedicke

Dr. Nathan Schmiedicke is the director of the CLAA Theology and Scripture programs.   Dr. Schmiedicke was born the fifth of eleven children and raised on a small family farm in Michigan. He attended Catholic school through eighth grade and was home-schooled through High school. After graduating with honors from Thomas Aquinas College (CA) he married, and began graduate school at Marquette University (Milwaukee). He completed his PhD in Biblical Theology in 2007. He has taught Theology, Scripture, Ethics, Patristics, classics, and languages at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary (Philadelphia, PA), The Aquinas Institute for Sacred Doctrine (Lander, Wyoming), Villanova University (Villanova, PA), The University of Mary (Rome, Italy Campus), Our Lady of Guadalupe Seminary (Lincoln, NE), as well as appearing on EWTN and Catholic Answers Live.  Dr. Schmiedicke is a Senior Fellow with Dr. Scott Hahn's St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology.  Nathan and Wendy have five boys.

Courses Taught:  Biblical Studies, Catechism of the Catholic Church, On Christian Doctrine, One Year Bible Survey.

Dr. Daniele Arcara

Dr. Arcara works as assistant professor of mathematics at St. Vincent College, in Pennsylvania and serves as the primary author of the CLAA's Classical Mathematics program.  Born and raised in Italy, Dr. Arcara received more of a "classical" mathematics education than American students do and this has allowed him to bring together the benefits of modern mathematical resources and the wisdom of the ancients.  He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from the Universita di Torino, Turin, Italy in 1996. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics in 2003 from the University of Georgia.  Dr. Arcara is Catholic husband and father with children studying in the Classical Liberal Arts Academy.

Courses taught:  Classical Arithmetic, Classical Geometry

Mr. Jonathan Peters

Mr. Peters holds a B.A. in liberal arts from Thomas Aquinas College and continued his graduate work at California State University Northridge, which houses one of the top ten music departments in the country. His areas of study included: advanced composition, theory, orchestration, and film scoring. For the past 20 years he has worked as teacher, composer, orchestrator, conductor, and recording artist. He is also the author of the "Scholastic Music Series", an educational classical music CD series which has received starred reviews from School Library Journal and is carried in schools and libraries throughout the country. Mr. Peters is an award-winning composer (1st place in the 1996 Composers Today Contest, among others) and has completed over 40 works including operatic, symphonic, chamber, solo, and sacred choral works. 

He and his wife, Jennifer, live in California with their four children. You may read more about him and hear his works by visiting:www.ComposerJonathanPeters.com.

Courses Taught:  Music Theory, Piano, Petty School Music

Dr. John Cuddeback

Growing up in the Patuxent Valley of Maryland, a paradise for birds, John Cuddeback followed in his father’s footsteps as an avid backyard bird-watcher and gardener. He spent many hours photographing and cataloguing the birds at his bedroom window feeder. Dr. Cuddeback later found that his love for and familiarity with animals and plants nourished his pursuit of higher studies in Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy. He received both an M.A. and a PhD. in philosophy from The Catholic University of America. Since 1995 he has taught in the philosophy department at Christendom College, as chairman from 2004 to 2008. He writes and lectures on various topics including virtue, culture, natural law, contemplation, and friendship.  His book “Friendship: The Art of Happiness” was published in 2003, and republished in 2010 as “Friendship: Where Virtue Becomes Happiness.”  Dr. Cuddeback, a lay Dominican, is still an avid gardener and bird watcher, as well as a hunter and homesteading-farmer. He lives with his wife and five children in the beautiful Shenandoah Valley.

Courses taught:  Natural History I

Dr. Christopher Blum

From his youth an avid hiker in the Blue Ridge of his native Virginia and in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, Christopher Blum’s love for natural history was lastingly enkindled by Dr. J. R. Riopel’s course Green Plants, which he took while a biology major at the University of Virginia.  Having spent the summers of his undergraduate years taking courses in field biology and working as a research assistant at biological field stations in Virginia and Montana, he was poised to pursue a career in fresh water ecology when the love of wisdom led him to the University of Notre Dame for the Ph.D. in the History and Philosophy of Science.  His studies there introduced him to Aristotle as a biologist, and he has been reading, teaching, and writing about Aristotle ever since, first as a professor at Christendom College and now as a Fellow of Thomas More College, in Merrimack, New Hampshire.  At Thomas More, Dr. Blum has designed and taught the required course in Natural History, in which the freshmen are introduced to the flora and fauna of the mixed hardwood forests that typify central New England.  As a scholar and writer, Dr. Blum’s interests have included such subjects as medieval French architecture, the educational vision of Blessed John Henry Newman, the novels of Jane Austen, and the French Catholic Counter-Enlightenment thinkers Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Joseph de Maistre, and Louis de Bonald.  Dr. Blum and his family live in an old white clapboard home in a small town in north-central Massachusetts with their dog and a bountiful garden.

Courses taught:  Natural History I

Mr. Henry Wingate

Henry Wingate began his training as a painter at the age of 28, after having served six years as a pilot in the Navy. From an early age he showed an interest in drawing and would have begun his formal study of painting on finishing high school had he found a college or studio that offered training in the traditional representational art that appealed to him. At that time, in the mid 1980's, modern art seemed to be completely dominant in college art departments, and Wingate chose another route. He received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy and graduated from Annapolis with a degree in History in 1988. He went on to flight school and ended up as an F-14 pilot stationed at Oceana, Virginia, and on board the USS Kennedy.

The six years in the Navy gave Wingate something of a late start toward his real career, the one he knew he would follow after the flying was over. On leaving the Navy, he discovered that there was a small group of ateliers, or working studios, teaching painting in the representational style that he had always loved. In 1994 he moved to Boston to study with Paul Ingbretson. He spent five years in the Ingbretson atelier and then added two short stints with another teacher from the same tradition, Charles Cecil, in Florence, Italy. Both Ingbretson and Cecil studied under Ives Gammell, the teacher, writer, and painter who kept the traditional atelier method of painting instruction alive, which formed a link back to the Paris ateliers of the 19th century. Gammell had been a student of the Boston painter, William Paxton, who, in turn, had studied at the Paris atelier of Gerome.

Now, pleased to be part of this tradition, Wingate has his studio in rural Madison, Virginia. He lives with his wife Mary and their three children in nearby Front Royal. He paints portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes, as well as larger figurative works.

Wingate has won numerous awards, including First Prize in the American Society of Portrait Artists 2000 competition, the Gold Medal of Honor at the 2003 Hudson Valley Art Association annual exhibition, and the Best Painting from Life Award of the National Oil & Acrylic Painters' Society in 2003. His work was featured in the 2006 issue of Portrait Highlights and as the cover article in the November, 2002, issue of American Artist.

Traditional Drawing