Thinking about the simple things

I wanted to teach my class of 7th graders the very simple and basic difference between a common and proper noun.  They should already know this, so I considered the lesson largely to be review. I drew a line down the middle of the board and asked the students to name nouns while I directed [...]

Don’t be hasty

I read this from the introduction this morning of Everett Dean Martin’s book The Meaning of a Liberal Education, copywritten 1926. But something of the shoddiness enters into the minds and hearts of men, when shortcuts are sought in matters of mental growth which are essentially processes of slow maturing.  Education requires time.  The only [...]

Firstfruits

How do you teach a group of 7th grade students the meaning of “firstfruits” in relation to the resurrection? At the beginning of each year I like to take my students through a simple overview of the biblical narrative with something I have put together under the title of “God’s Redemptive Story.” Outlined in this [...]

Prejudice the Soil

The essentialist rejects the progressive theory of growth with nothing-fixed-in-advance, a planless education based upon the unselected experiences and needs of the child or even selected by cooperative, shared discussions of pupils and teachers.  Growth cannot be self-directed; it needs direction through a carefully chosen environment to an end or ends in the minds of [...]

Liberal Education

I came across a book in our public library titled The Meaning of a Liberal Education by Everett Dean Martin published in 1926, a seminal period for progressive education. The following is a quote from the chapter “Liberal Education vs. Book Learning.” The last sentence is golden. People persist in thinking that education comes to [...]

Testing

How did testing and accountability become the main levers of school reform? How did our elected officials become convinced that measurement and data would fix the schools? Somehow our nation got off track in its efforts to improve education.  What once was the standards movement was replaced by the accountability movement. What once was an [...]

Discovery

Michael Polanyi (Personal Knowledge) outlined the stages one goes through to solve a problem.  One begins with Preparation leading to Illumination, and concludes with Verification.  The original study of H. Poincare he is pulling from listed four stages: Preparation – Incubation – Illumination – Verification. Coleridge begins his essay, The Education of Children, by stating, [...]

Thoughts on the Imagination

The following five points are relatively undeveloped thoughts on the imagination, and may seem slightly cryptic and abstract.  I attempt to relate these thoughts to the teacher’s task in the classroom at the end. 1.  The imagination is awakened by admiration. 2.  Two powers associated with the imagination are the perceptive and the formative.  Once the [...]

Saddles, Novels, and Coleridge

Approximately 200 years ago Coleridge argued, The common modern novel, in which there is no imagination, but a miserable struggle to excite and gratify mere curiosity, ought, in my judgment, to be wholly forbidden to children. Novel-reading of this sort is especially injurious to the growth of the imagination, the judgment, and the morals, especially to [...]

Oracle of the Dog

I hope not to spoil this Father Brown story, but it has made a recent impression on me. A man is retelling to Father Brown the details of an unsolved murder that took place several hundred miles away.  Those who were there believed the murderer to be a man that the victim’s dog barked at [...]