Each September, while the students (and teachers) are shaking the summer from their minds in hopes of focusing on the newborn school year, the TRA Secondary students (7th-12th graders) head into the mountains for their Fall Retreat, traditionally at Tall Timber Ranch. It’s a time of resetting, renewal, and relationship-building, and it’s possibly the most important event of the secondary school year.
You may ask–as many of us do from time to time–why do we take two to three days out of the beginning of the school year to go on a retreat? Isn’t the beginning of the year integral for establishing the routines and rhythms inherent in a school’s healthy life? Don’t students need consistency? Shouldn’t they start doing homework? Yes to all those things. As the Principal and Academic Dean, you’d think we’d strive to stay in the classrooms at all costs. That should tell you exactly how important Tall Timber Retreat is, that we’re willing (eager, even) to postpone such critical classroom time to go have fun, to reconnect, to bond with one another. As highly as we value education from our grand old books, we have learned that our core value of relational teaching has to come first in order to lay the groundwork for all the hard, valuable things we do throughout the school year.
The amount of growth we see from students just over that two to three day span is shocking. We have seen new students who arrive on day one of school, trying their best to hide in the corners, start to come alive in the brisk air of the mountains while playing nighttime capture the flag, or scream in joy (or terror?) while they zoom down the zip-line. Some students do not shine as brightly in the classrooms, but in settings like Tall Timber or House, they exude joy (another TRA core value), reveal previously hidden leadership traits, and forge lasting friendships.
Our Fall Retreat at Tall Timber takes place over three days (the past two years have been strange because of the pandemic). On Tuesday night, House Leaders head up to the Ranch to start their own bit of bonding. This is an important time because, being leaders, they need to be on their games from the moment the 10th-12th graders arrive on Wednesday. These upperclassmen get to go through the ropes courses and to soak in the nature around them, to be spoken to at their level a bit more. Then, on Thursday, the 7th-9th graders arrive en masse. Seventh graders and new students are sorted into their houses via house shirts being flung in their general direction via giant slingshot , then it’s off to the races with activities, prayer, worship, and bonding galore.
Tall Timber is one of the primary ways that we set the tone for the year. We intentionally foster fellowship through our House-building activities and worship, establish our themes for the year through our speakers, and integrate the new secondary students into the student body through House Games. This aligns with our core values in every way: it promotes joy-filled relationships, Christian fellowship, even classical modeling of behavior from the staff to students and from the older students to the younger.
So, while we could get a few more Math problems taught, some more logical fallacies learned, many more pages read in Beowulf, our time at Tall Timber on our Fall Retreat is irreplaceable.
-Tonya Griffith, Principal, and Tyler Howat, Dean of Academics.
