Summer Reading for New Nolensville Knights:
As we embark upon the exciting quest of creating a community of learners at Nolensville
High School, we need to examine the values we want to define us. To that end we are adopting
an incoming freshman reading to be completed before school begins in August 2017 and ALL
new Knights—administrators, faculty, staff, parents and students. The reading selection is
titled, appropriately, Rules for a Knight by Ethan Hawke. A short book, Rules for a Knight—
“. . .takes the form of a letter from a father to his four children. The father is an imagined
fifteenth-century ancestor of Hawke’s, a Cornish knight named Sir Thomas Lemuel
Hawke. Writing on the eve of a battle, Sir Thomas presents a guide for living an upright
and noble life in twenty short chapters, each containing a moral and a parable.”
The New Yorker, November 2015
When we read about virtues such as patience, equality, discipline, friendship, and
honesty, we want to reflect upon our own values and think about which are most important and
why. At NHS we want not only “rules” for attendance and school work but also a shared vision
for the qualities we want all Knights to embody.
Available from Amazon, local bookstores, and libraries, Rules for a Knight is entertaining
as well as thought-provoking. (Also, all of the royalties from the sale of the book are to be
donated to groups helping young people with learning disabilities.) Please join us in this effort
to create a code of conduct and engage ourselves in the business of becoming knights.