Tolkien, Faeries, and Creation: A Featured Article
BY ANDREW SEELEY My family has a standing joke about my talks and articles – no matter what the subject, Papa somehow manages to work Tolkien into every one. Probably an exaggeration, and I certainly don’t “manage” it; Tolkien’s works have found a privileged place in that central storage of thought and image known as [...]
A New Kind of University: An Interview About Augustine College
AUGUSTINE COLLEGE claims to be “an alternative to the norm in higher education – an alternative that aims higher.” A one-year, distinctly Christian liberal arts program, Augustine is certainly unique. In fact, I think it’s safe to say there are only a handful of colleges like it (at most). With only around 20-25 students on campus [...]
Assessment and the Regular Child
We are nearing the end of the so-called school year. Many of our children have already faced grueling testing processes. Now we know what kind of students they are and can predict their future life success because children are not born persons, they are really just mathematical equations ready to be sorted. Assessment may be [...]
Dehydration
Oppressive heat comes standard with a North Carolina August. Hoping to avoid the soon-to-be ninety-plus temperatures, I got up early, strapped my road bike onto the carrier, and set out. Off to complete one last trial run for an upcoming charity race, more than twenty-one miles awaited me – 3.1 running, 16.2 on bike, and [...]
Nurturing Introverts in the Classroom
Lists of rules for introverts have been floating around the Internet in recent weeks. These lists include such admonitions as 1) let them observe before speaking, 2) let them think and don’t demand instant answers, 3) respect their need for privacy, 4) don’t interrupt them, and 5) respect their introversion and don’t try to remake [...]
Classically Educating the Regular Child
Don’t tell anyone but not all of my children are geniuses, maybe not any of them. Ouch! That hurts. If the definition of classical education was ‘really hard’ then a few of my children would not be succeeding in life right now. They would have crashed on the shore of labels, never to rise again. [...]
Inspiring Children
Children love knowing, but they seem to hate studying. Why is that? It might be that we are not thinking about knowledge the way they experience it. Here’s a long reflection I engaged in this morning about some distinctions that I consider important. It’s a response to a question on Susan Wise Bauer’s amazing forum, [...]
April 2012 Podcast: Cindy Rollins
In the April 2012 edition of Quiddity, the CiRCE Podcast, I had the really fun opportunity to interview Cindy Rollins. Cindy is a regular contributor to our website and blogs here. Cindy has more than 20 years experience as a homeschooler and therefore has a wealth of knowledge (very nearly second to none!). In this conversation we [...]
What’s Rote About Memory?
Apprentice Tucker Teague forwarded this quotation from George Steiner’s Real Presences. you’ll see easily why I like it. To learn by heart is to afford the text or music an indwelling clarity and life-force. Ben Johnson’s term, “ingestion”, is precisely right. What we know by heart becomes an agency in our consciousness, a ‘pace-maker’ in [...]
When I Was A Child I Read Books
The Pulitzer Prize winning author of novels like Housekeeping, Gilead, and Home, Marilynne Robinson is one of America’s best living writers. But, while perhaps best known for her fiction, she is also one of the most thought provoking essayists of our time, on par, dare I say, with Wendell Berry. Like Berry, she is concerned [...]
