Category: Article

The real is a closely woven fabric. —Maurice Merleau-Ponty In the fascinating life of Thomas Merton (1915-1968), we can see a biographical arc intertwining many themes and realities, traditional and modern. As a young adult, Merton was fairly typical of an intellectually-inclined college student in the first half of the twentieth century, but in his later vocation as a Trappist monk, he was deeply formed in the pre-modern outlook of the Cistercian order. Even then, he was conscious to a high degree of the prestige of the literary profession that…

Pat Miggins explores the depths under Tom Sawyer’s simple schemes and fantastical imaginings. Twain shows us in Tom what’s involved in growing up.

Real memorization is creative, personal, and fun; false memorization is ruinous.

A postgame review of every test that’s handed back is perhaps the easiest—and most neglected—step towards improvement.

A dress code can meet the occasion or elevate the tone—without squashing personal expression or upholding Draconian standards.

Cooking and baking develop that intangible quality known as experience. It’s judgment, confidence, and humility found by experiments, mistakes, and taking notes.

A common controversy in math is between the “drill and kill” camp and the “inquiry-based learning” camp. The problem is that both of them are right—and both of them are wrong.

It’s been said that reading a translation is like kissing your wife through a handkerchief. What comes between changes the experience; something is lost. Today, as technology increasingly “mediates” our experiences, we are losing something too—perhaps our humanity. This is the argument of Dr. Christine Rosen, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, in her book The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World.  Experiences are direct contacts between our human nature—our bodies, minds, emotions, and perceptions—and reality. Technology (and our desire for ease, comfort, and safety)…

I think I was in my early thirties when I first heard a scientific observation that has since passed into common knowledge, namely, that our brains aren’t fully developed until age 25. While I don’t remember exactly when I first heard this factoid, I am confident that it was after my twenty-fifth birthday. In other words, I don’t think there has ever been a day on which my immaturity could be explained by the neuroscientists’ assertion that my brain was still a work in progress. And yet my brain was…

Every Thursday morning, the teachers of the Valley gather for a weekly meeting that is low in procedural fluff and high in substance – that is to say, rather than talking about nothing to accomplish nothing, we may read an essay or short story (Edward Abbey’s polemic from Desert Solitaire, Fr. James Schall on grades, Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture, to name a few) or chew on some poetry alongside bagels and coffee. One such morning last school year, we read and discussed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “My Lost…