Teach me to care and not to care.
There is a common misbelief that the 2011 Super Bowl Half Time Show, which featured the Black Eyed Peas, is the worst of all time. I myself may have participated in this error.
The 2000 Super Bowl Half Time Show is not only worse, it is also one of the stranger things to ever happen on network television.
Not every call for moderation is sincere. It is possible to call for moderation and want none of it. How so? If a certain institution is lenient, indulgent, and slow to anger, it will nonetheless be forced to draw the line at some point.
When the institution draws the line and begins to scold, chastise, and discipline, sentimentalists will accuse the institution of being “immoderate.” In fact, the very acts of scolding and chastisement and discipline are creating a moderate condition. They are balancing the lenience and indulgence which are typical.
This is typical of a sentimental age, though. Indulgence reigns. When indulgence ends, calls for moderation are little more than calls for indulgence to return again.
American revolutionaries: (throwing pilot from cockpit onto tarmac) No captain by Captain Jesus!
American revolutionaries: (overturning pots and pans in the kitchen) No chef but Chef Jesus!
American revolutionaries: (shanking a heart surgeon) No doctor but Dr. Jesus!
I am interested in whether any fellow teachers have led class trips to New York City in the last year or so, and if they have, what it was like. If you have experience leading class trips to NYC post-COVID, I would love to hear about it.
You can contact me through Gibbs Classical.
“Just as small-minded administrators, parents, and students cannot distinguish between different kinds of difficult teachers, small-minded teachers lump every sort of difficult student into the same “bad” bunch. A disobedient student is a liar, a cheat, a scofflaw who disregards small rules, a queen bee enthralled by the shallowness of popular culture, a bully whose parents continually excuse sin with appeals to grace, stress, and extenuating circumstances. However, a difficult student bound for greatness might create the same number of headaches as a disobedient student, but wise teachers discern the path of greatness unfolding in the difficult student’s soul.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
The Netflix adaptation of Persuasion is a hot algorithmic mess which helplessly bites half a dozen better sources (a more appropriate title for the film would have been Jane Austen’s Fleabag), and yet I was pleased to find the zeitgeist has moved on from “self-care,” which is now a punchline subject to open mockery and scorn.
If a man does not have enough real problems, he will invent fake ones. Fake problems are even more destructive than real problems. Why? Real problems can prompt people to seek real solutions, but fake problems only prompt fake solutions. The man with fake problems is not only stuck with a certain level of fakeness, he is actively seeking out even more fakeness.
After fifteen years, the price of this one finally came down to around 20 USD and my copy just arrived in the mail. Not disappointed at all.
Step one: Say something profound or provocative.
Step two: Count the number of people who respond in any way. That is how many followers you actually have.
Step three: Repent of all the ways you have lied to yourself when explaining to yourself why almost no one ever responds to your tweets.
“Many teachers defend showing videos in class on the grounds they’re “educational,” but this proves far too little. You can teach children data with a screen, but data isn’t formational. Screens are formational, though. A little child who uses videos to learn the alphabet may learn his subject much faster than a little child learning the alphabet with books, but he also learns to depend on screens and, years later, lacks a compelling reason to read Pride & Prejudice when watching the miniseries is faster and more fun. If your goal is to raise readers, using videos to teach them to read will get them literate faster, but that won’t mean they want to read books. The same is true of videos which teach history, science, or philosophy. Videos make everything faster and more fun. Within a classical framework, though, this is a compelling reason to not use them in the classroom.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.