Boyhood at Risk (Part One)
I lay on my back, starring at the sky with my feet above me on the hill. My bike flew overhead – that much I knew – but where it landed was a mystery. The ditch crept up on me, as tends to happen on unfamiliar roads, while I was trying my best to keep [...]
Dealing with “Senioritis”
Every teacher that has twelfth grade students understands “senioritis” and its symptoms – lack of focus, daydreaming, poor attitudes, slackening work ethic. Of course, such symptoms could be said to describe all high school students at one time or another. True enough, but seniors tend to have them in heavier doses. Growing restless, occupied with [...]
The Business of a College Education
There is an interesting conversation going on right now about college education. Skyrocketing tuition costs and a serious economic depression have combined to create a large group of highly educated but unemployed people saddled with serious college debt. As a result, many people are beginning to question what just a decade ago was a self-evident [...]
Good Books for Great Readers
You know about The Great Books and even the best books, but what about plain old good books? These books are the meat and potatoes of a child’s reading life especially those children who read constantly. My son James read The Hobbit in one day. I don’t recommend that but it happens. My oldest son, [...]
The Energy of Comparison: How a Coleridge Poem Connects Us to the Nexus
“A delight//Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad//As I myself were there!” These lines, appropriately placed in the middle of Coleridge’s poem “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” reveal the beauty and excitement of delight experienced vicariously through nature and others. The speaker, Coleridge himself, experiences a powerful inner joy through imagining himself on [...]
Six Days of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio
This guest post was written by Dr. Carol Reynolds, author of Discovering Music. ~ Everybody knows the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” but what about the six days of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio? It’s an astonishing work, but encountered far less often than Handel’s nearly contemporary Messiah. And when we hear it, it’s likely in a concert [...]
Why I Am A Humanities Teacher
Origins I didn’t mean to become a humanities teacher. I blame the stories. Having fallen in love with classical languages in college, I seized the opportunity to teach Latin at a classical school. My only obstacle was that I didn’t actually know Latin. I knew Greek, had even taught it, but Latin was a [...]
Why Language Sets Us Free
Recently, I was sitting in on a teacher training session at a Christian inner-city high school in which an “expert” on SIOP Lesson Plans had been brought in to teach the faculty how to create effective lesson plans. I don’t know what SIOP stands for, but it was something that the Michigan Department of Education [...]
The Importance of Voluntary Organisation
In 1917, a young Harvard graduate and poet named John Reed was in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, he had played a role in making it happen. In 1919 he wrote a book about it called Ten Days That Shook the World. Someone has pasted inside the front cover of my copy a [...]
Teaching Shakespeare To Children
This guest post was written by Cindy Rollins. — What do you think of when you hear the name Shakespeare? A surprising number of people have fiercely negative reactions, perhaps thinking of their bohemian English teacher sweeping across the room quoting the tragic Ophelia, “”There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” What possible benefit could a modern [...]
