A few weeks after school finished this year, I asked my high schooler to recall anything she had learned from her recent final exams. From American history she remembered a list of native American staple crops: corn, beans, and squash, a list, she tells me, that her class remembers with the helpful acronym CBS. Some …
Socrates: Excuse me, but someone left a large ugly plastic thing in my classroom. I tripped over one of the hanging wires. Staff: Socrates, that’s your new smartboard. Tomorrow is a faculty development day so you can learn how to use it. Socrates: What am I going to use it for? Separate the talkers? Plato …
“Say the truth no matter what,” advises Jordan Peterson in a podcast with Joe Rogan. That advice sounded patronizing to me, a teacher, a person whose vocation is to tell the truth. Had I ever stood in front of my students and refused to tell the truth? Had I ever deliberately tried to deceive them? …
Growing up, I was the kid who was at church “every time the doors were opened.” Since my Christian school was a ministry of our church, my school and church schedules never conflicted, and I never had to choose between two masters. Wednesdays were “no homework nights” because everyone was expected to be at the …
In high school, I can remember reading only one work of fiction, which was, ironically, Great Expectations. In my blue-collar town, manual labor and resourcefulness were predominant virtues, so each year our headmaster directed the high school students to set up a large outdoor Fall Festival. One year we repurposed an old rubber swing seat …
This Sunday, my fourteen-year-old son was qualified to compete in the NYC Junior High championship debate tournament. But since the event will take place on a Sunday, he declined, choosing to be at our church’s worship service instead. My husband and I did not coerce him, and we are in no way advocating a legalistic …
