keys to success

1. The key to a successful working relationship is to avoid proximity.
2. The key to success is following your first impulse!
Wait, I need to think about that.

How to Teach the Iliad as a Living Text with Living Ideas

You want to start by getting students involved in THE QUESTION that drives the text or as close as you are able to do so. The Iliad puts it right on the first line: Why is Achilles so angry? I convert the question to a judicial issue: Should Achilles have been so angry?
Before starting the [...]

Can you be Market Driven and Please God at the same time?

And having asked that, can you please God if you don’t attend to your market?
In Galatians 1:10 Paul writes, “If I still pleased men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ.”
It is easy for the more individualistic to take this verse to mean they should be indifferent to “men,” speaking aggressively and assertively the [...]

Strategic Plans

Peter Drucker, the godfather of strategic thinking, wrote a series of essays that have been collected in a very helpful book called Managing the Non-Profit Organization: Principles and Practices. The book is filled with provocative and suggestive chapter titles like Leadership is a Foul-Weather Job; What the Leader Owes; Converting Good Intentions into Results; Building [...]

A few more thoughts about sex, guilt, multi-culturalism, and freedom

Sexual liberation is rooted, historically, in interpretations of Freud and developed by Herbert Marcuse. It’s all related to guilt.

Multi-culturalism has used a confusion strategy to assist it. Various cultures have varying sexual mores, the argument goes, therefore there are no sexual laws that are not mere cultural impositions.
The great crisis of multi-culturalism is precisely that there is [...]

Teaching things and conventions

Much mischief has been accomplished in educating children about symbols without first giving them a thorough and dynamic experience of the living idea to which the symbol points.
Children doing math who only think conventionally may well conclude that they aren’t “math people.” Children doing letters think conventionally (letters are conventions), but hardly realize that these letters represent [...]

teaching living ideas

At the heart of the Christian classical curriculum and methodology is the presentation of living ideas. The soul feeds on ideas, and its health is determined by the quality of those ideas and the life found in them.
When we teach children about butterflies, we do not begin by showing them dead butterflies pinned to a board. [...]

Christianity and the Classical Mind

You hear a lot about Tertullian’s outcry: “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Less commonly heard are these words from Clement of Alexandria, perhaps because, like Tertullian, Clement went to some extremes. Like Tertullian. Anyway:
Before the Lord’s coming, philosophy was an essential guide to righteousness for the Greeks. At the present time, it is [...]

SAT and ACT: the Measure of all Things

In II Corinthians 10:12, St. Paul offers a pointed critique of the sophists who were maneuvering to undercut his authority. He says:
For we dare not class ourselves or compare ourselves with those who commend themselves. But they, measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themsleves among themselves, are not wise.
Is this not a critique of conventional [...]

Charlotte Mason on Neuroscience

She was up on the latest before most people even knew the lastest was up! Wisdom like Charlotte Mason’s is our only hope as we progress into a biotechnological future.
There is no more interesting subject of inquiry open just now than that of the interaction between the thoughts of the mind and the configuration of [...]