What kids learn

At a retreat I’m attending, Bob Ingram made this really profound statement. Try to draw out the implications for your school.

The kids glean from the spillover of the intellectual life of the faculty

Abbot and Costello on math

7 X 13 = 28! Here’s another version of this gag from a week or two ago. Abbott and Costello add so many little details that it’s even more hilarious.

“Did you ever go to school, stupid?”
“Yeah, and I came out the same way.”
DO NOT let your children watch this!!

Liberal Arts and Servile Arts

Christian and classical school often find themselves in a dilemma in regard to what they should offer by way of classes. A school must make a multitude of choices concerning curricular, co-curricular and extra-curricular offerings. Recovering a basic understanding of classical education as a liberal arts education will assist in helping schools with these decisions.
The [...]

If Something is Worth Doing…

My pastor included this quote in our order of worship today.  I had seen it before, but was glad to see it again.  Here’s to those of you that have entered a good work and continue to persevere:
 

“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, [...]

End of Apprenticeship report

Two very full days of work have just ended, so I was unable to fulfill my dream of more or less regular updates. I’ll have more to add, but we’re about to go out for one last meal and I want to at least touch in with you.
The journeymen spent hours developing ideas about teaching [...]

Godly Self-indulgence?

Oh, I’m anxious to write about what I’ve learned and witnessed today, but we all need to run to A Taste of Texas for some of the most incredible steak a man can possibly eat! So while I’m sitting in the restaurant eating warm buttered bread, cutting steak that melts like butter, luxuriating in the [...]

Apprenticeship: End of Day One

I eat “not wisely, but too well” on these apprenticeship retreats! Tex Mex for lunch and Texas BBQ (brisket, chicken, and sausage) for dinner. But I also feed deeply on the friendships that have grown and been growing over the past few years. Today was spent with the journeymen, all of whom have been in [...]

Judgment, Introductions, and Audiences

We’re on lunch break and the five journeymen are outside sitting at a picnic table in the moist warmth of a Houston January day with the sound of the Wrobleske’s pool in the background and the sun joining them for a quiet meal.
We’ve just completed a pretty intense couple hours discussing how to teach paragraph [...]

Socrates and Meno at the apprenticeship retreat

Here I am at the apprentice retreat and everybody thinks I am dutifully typing notes, but really I’m blogging.
Just kidding. We’ve just completed a brief discussion about Plato’s short dialogue called the Meno in which Socrates discusses whether virtue can be taught with Meno and Plato gives two very clear models of Socratic dialectics. I [...]

Apprenticeship retreat launch

I’m in Houston for the winter apprenticeship retreat so I’m going to try to post an entry or two during the day to let you know what’s happening. I’ll say this to embitter you yangki’s: it’s about 70 degrees outside. Having grown up in Wisconsin, I can hardly absorb a January day in the 70’s.
Also, [...]