Category: Article

Since Easter came later this year, my wife and I had already begun Spring Cleaning before break even arrived. By this time in the season, I’m sure we’ve all been switching to warm-weather clothes, figuring out what needs to be handed down and what thrown away, trimming bushes, cleaning up outdoor spaces, (re-)organizing garages, workshops, laundry rooms, or sheds. This annual tradition also gave me time and space outside of the classroom to think about my own teaching. We have about six weeks before summer hits. So I’m suggesting some…

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) plunged into World War I, the Greco-Turkish War, the Spanish Civil War, and World War II with the confidence of a skilled matador twirling his cape over a furious 1200-pound bull. He was a journalist in all but The Great War, in which he was an ambulance driver who sustained serious injuries at the front. Survival was thrilling (so were the drinks afterwards), and then he got to write about its gory, mud-flecked glory. Well, mostly the mud and the gore. Glory wasn’t really Hemingway’s thing.  As…

I recently listened to a podcast from a Mathematician named Marcus du Sautoy in which he talks about how, although we hear so often growing up not to take shortcuts, we should indeed take many shortcuts, and we do it all the time. And he has a point. Although I could multiply 456.76 and 341.08 by hand, it is much easier to do with a calculator, and if there is one nearby, I will always grab it. So, why is it so often taught at home and school to not…

Education isn’t just reading, or reading and talking. As it turns out, even reading only gets you so far, just like physical exercise only gets you so far, even if truly spent in a leisurely fashion (see article on the difference between free time and leisure). A real education also includes vibrant social interaction. Obvious. Perhaps not so obvious is the fact that social interaction (much like leisure) always enlivens and enriches best in a semi-structured scenario. For example, a birthday party has a predictable structure of events: cake, presents,…

Sometimes, in moments of unexpected pedagogical turbulence, I offer penitent students the opportunity to earn extra credit by reflecting on an essay by one of my old teachers: What a Student Owes His Teacher, by James V. Schall, S.J. I have an unusual attachment to that essay, because reading it invariably puts me back in Government 117, Fr. Schall’s “Elements of Political Theory” class. The reminiscence is bittersweet, though, because unfortunately I imagine myself trying desperately to avoid Fr. Schall’s gaze—and more importantly, his Socratic questioning. I imagine it that…

One of the great fruits of studying classics is learning to read carefully. Translating ancient languages trains you to facilitate communication: you have to create a faithful representation of what person A said so that person B can understand it. You have to be able in every instance to point to someone’s exact words in order to claim to know what he or she is thinking. This is city-building on the personal level, and that’s one shade of the meaning of the word “communication”.  This is why we spend so…

“It is idle to complain of schools and colleges being trivial. Schools and colleges must always be trivial. In no case will a college ever teach the important things. For before a man is twenty, he has always learned the important things. He has learned them right or wrong, and he has learned them all alone.” Recently I came across this passage by G.K. Chesterton at a conference hosted by The Heights School on The Teaching Vocation.  It brought current and aspiring teachers as well as administrators from across the…

I distinctly remember Mrs. Yang’s high school chemistry notes. Do I remember the formulas? No. Nor the various chemical bonds or the differences between nitrates and nitrites. What I do remember is her process. She would start her notes on one side of a two-sided chalkboard and talk while we copied down the material. Then she would wipe the board down with a wet sponge before flipping to the other side where the next round of notes awaited her eager chemists. Meanwhile, the wet side of the board dried so…

Ray Bradbury and Nathaniel Hawthorne excel as writers, not the least for their imagination and insight. But these particular authors also excel at the art of making word puddles.  I use the term “word puddles” in my English classes to describe a torrent of words which don’t necessarily have depth when sounded individually, but sloshed about in the same sentence they collect into an atmospheric unity, condensing into a story more fluid and more full of meaning. For example, I just wrote a sentence about “word puddles” in which I…

As teachers, we want our students to know the truth, to the fullest and deepest extent they can, and this is just as true within the study of history as it is in math, science, philosophy, or theology. But while some other subjects can be experienced in real time, history is gone, often long gone, and students can have a very limited context or framework within which to place particular historical events or figures. Put another way, they have a hard time seeing the reality of the history they are…