The Person

In a child’s words. A stone is, a tree lives, a lion senses, and a person understands. You are one soul with one body, and you choose by what you know.

The Institute habit

Children valued for their use: Messengers, the top students, prized as channels for the Whisperer, and Helpers the students were not allowed to speak to. Against it, Constance, whom everyone overlooked, who turns out at the end to be not yet three.

The book

The Spiders order the orphanage to shun Nicholas; John and Violet become his friends.

Week 1 · the kind of answer

The ladder of beings: sort twenty things (a pebble, a fern, the cat, the child, the angel Gabriel) by what each can do: be, live, sense, understand. Monday puzzle: what-am-I riddles told by powers alone.

Week 2 · the essay

The Filler of Voids, in the register of Simone Weil, read whole. Set the phone feed beside the Whisperer: one fills every empty moment, the other soothes every fear, and neither lets attention form. Keep a void diary for a day. The Score is an optional second essay; read the note on it for parents first.

Week 3 · the case

Mr. Benedict falls asleep whenever he laughs hard. A rule that tied the image of God to reason in use would take it from him every time he slept. The rule fails: the image is not a score. Ask the same of Constance at three, of a newborn, of a Helper whose memories were swept.

The workshop · suggested

For a child taking the workshop strand, Project 4, the machine’s language. It begins: the machine’s own language, programs written by hand and stepped through one instruction at a time. The program means something to its writer and nothing to the machine.

The end first

The soul is the body’s form and its end: the eye is for seeing, a power is known by what it does, and what it does by what it is for. Give each rung of the ladder its “for”. Then ask of the Whisperer: what was it for, and whose end did it serve?

Fridays

A team problem: each child names one thing another child can do that they cannot.