Mr. Tanquist  |  Sixth Grade |  Ascent of Northern Colorado

ABOUT ME

My name is Stephen Tanquist. I grew up overseas in Dakar, Senegal where my parents worked, and I graduated from Hillsdale College in 2020 with a major in English and a minor in Classical Education. I have a lovely wife named Sarah, who is teaching Upper School Math and a Theater elective for the Upper School students here at Ascent. This is going to be my second year in a teaching position, though my first year teaching Math.

Despite my lack of experience, I have a great love of story, both in literature and in the history of our civilization. Narrative has a power unlike any other to capture the human soul and raise it to a better understanding of the universe and man’s place within it. It is my hope not just to teach your children the facts of the content, but to enable the stories we read to find a resting place within their hearts, enabling them to better discern the world around them and to react prudently to its changing circumstances.

In addition to a love of story (and learning in general), I have a strong passion for theater, one of the best windows into how various cultures viewed themselves and expressed their passions. This will not have a huge place in the day-to-day affairs of our particular classroom, though it will play a part in some of their homework.

EDUCATION PHILOSOPHY

Education seeks to produce within students the attitudes and desires necessary for them to live well. It seeks to instill in them a love for the proper things so that they may become virtuous and capable of appropriately responding to the various needs and demands of their environment. Once graduating from the school, they should have the tools to continue with their education for the entirety of their lives, always growing and developing. As a teacher, my role and my joy is in challenging them and exciting them into the pursuit of growth and truth.

WHAT I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO

In Math, the students will begin to dip their toes in the waters of a subject they have been building up to for some time: Algebra. I am eager to show the students the continuity between Algebra and what they have already learned, as well as how it represents problem-solving techniques they already use in engaging with the world. 

The unit I am most looking forward to in History is our exploration of the French Revolution.  Many students rightly have a great fondness and esteem for the American Revolution and the active participants within it. On the surface, the French Revolution is an extension of those ideas, and yet it goes much further than its American counterpart and leaves a wake of destruction behind it from which France has never recovered. I love seeing students engage with this, try to understand how this was different than what they learned about a short time ago. It is a challenging period, but a rewarding one to explore as a class.

In Literature, we will soon enter into The Count of Monte Cristo, one of my favorite novels. Throughout their entire schooling here, our students will be examining virtue and how it is represented through the stories we read. This book is one of the earliest complex moral works they will encounter at Ascent, and it sparks all kinds of thought and debate. There are a lot of tantalizing details and aspects of this story for students to mull over, and I am greatly looking forward to our discussions.