Beethooven’s Fifth, sort of

Don’t watch this if you are a musical purist, but I think this could actually be used to help kids understand classical music – or at least Beethooven. It’s hilarious, with apologies to John Hodges.

It’s not Time to Quit

I wasn’t going to add something so quickly but in reviewing a post, I ran across this one and had to add it here:
The lesson is this: Don’t tell me the future. I’ve learned, unquestionably, that resilience—not prophecy—is the greatest gift.
That’s from Leading Blog, cut from a speech by Ralph W. Shrader of Booz, Allen, [...]

How to Teach Students how to Think

David Hicks on Socratic thinking:
By making his students conscious of their dialectical thinking processes, Socrates hoped to assign them parts in a dramatic dialogue that otherwise occurs unconsciously and haphazardly in the thinking mind. Once the conversation between Socrates and his students deliberately took on the dialectical form of mental activity, learning became possible. Man [...]

Does Christian Education Have a Place in American Culture?

Maybe that question isn’t as easy as it sounds at first. How much of what we do in our Christian schools arises from the pressures of our culture and how much of it arises from the gospel? We can never stop thinking about that.
So here’s a link to an article at The Educated Imagination that [...]

Treating Symptoms

I have had chronic back pain for several years now. It has finally become intolerable the point of my having a medical procedure done yesterday. During the process of explaining the procedure, the doctor grabbed my attention my asserting a phrase that is rarely heard in the medical profession these days. He [...]

Reading Poetry aloud

Our friends over at Eucharisteo pointed me to this really excellent looking web site where they provide readings of a growing number of great English poems. What I’ve heard is read with an English accent, which seems important to me.
Remember that most poetry was originally written with the expectation of public readings, so if you aren’t comfortable or familiar with this [...]

The political future of American Education?

Richard Dawkins, a Rabbi, a Catholic, and a minister of education got together to discuss education. No, it’s not the preamble to a joke. It’s an English TV debate about the role of religion in the state schools. This raises a lot of issues people might need to be aware of in the not too distant [...]

Home schooling: The Choicest Choice

In a refreshing article in Education Next, the excellent education journal of the Hoover Institution, Paul Peterson says:
Home schooling is hardly foreign to the American experience. John Locke’s advice to parents in colonial America was to educate their children at home. He could not imagine “what qualities are ordinarily to be got from…a troop of [...]

The Certified Teacher Myth: Wall Street Journal

I would guess my opinions on state certification of teachers is not hidden, so maybe I like this article for all the wrong reasons. But I still like it. I cannot respect the notion that something as personal as teaching can be regulated by pure abstractions.
My wife and I still laugh about her being taught [...]

Progressive Education Analyzed from a Christian classical perspective

You can imagine that if the Progressive theorist reduces method to only scientific experimentation, the child to merely a material being who responds to material and efficient causes, knowledge and knowing to nothing more than an interactive process, virtue to unstable values rooted in environmental interactions, meaning to consequences, then, along with all these reductions, there must also be an alteration in teaching.