Loving Jesus Is Not Enough To Hold A Classical School Together

“There’s a tendency among modern Christians to throw the expression “loving Jesus” around as though it’s a universal solution to every theological, political, philosophical, aesthetic, moral and cultural dispute between baptized human beings, and that anyone who says otherwise is being legalistic or petty. However, it’s quite common for appeals to the fact we both “love Jesus” to mean, “You should be open to doing things my way and if you’re not, you’re being tribal and exclusive.” We’re embarrassed to admit there are deep, real differences between Christians and so we pretend “loving Jesus” can cover over all those differences.” 

-from my latest for CiRCE

Introduction To Ambient Music

Ambient music is born of a rather simple premise: switching the foreground with the background. Sonically, there are many “backgrounds” upon which our lives carry out, the most common of which is simply the collective sound of nature itself: wind, rain, the roar of the ocean, flowing water, thunder, the chatter of insects, birdsong, the rustle of leaves. While there is nothing sophisticated or evenly orderly to the sound of nature, most people nonetheless find it pleasant and even comforting. Andy Stott’s “Time Away” is a series of surging, overlapping drones which mirror the background sounds of nature, albeit with references to the pleasing background sounds of civilization, like the distant hum of traffic.

What “Top Gun: Maverick” Gets Right About Education

“Top Gun: Maverick is a gazillion dollar action movie, but most of the film takes place in a school. It’s an elite flight school for fighter pilots, sure, but a school nonetheless, and the relationship between the teacher and his students in the film is strikingly free of modern classroom cliches. For starters, the teacher in Top Gun: Maverick is an actual teacher. He’s wiser, more experienced, and more humane than his students. He’s also older and more stable than his students, which means he really doesn’t have anything to learn from his students. They have a good deal to learn from him. Against such a conventional premise, our modern hackles are raised.”

-from What Top Gun: Maverick Gets Right About Education, my latest for CiRCE

Theory Vs Experience

“At the moment, a good deal of what passes as instruction in classical pedagogy is mere theory, not experience or common sense, and this is because there are relatively few veteran teachers have with big platforms in the classical Christian movement. Instead: consultants, administrators, college profs, and bloggers. Give me the ten biggest names in classical Christian education right now—how many of them are elementary teachers? How many are high school teachers? Obviously, the movement needs consultants, administrators, bloggers, and so forth, for all these people play significant, indispensable roles. Don’t get me wrong. My concern has more to do with who is teaching teachers how to teach. Do the people teaching teachers how to teach have much experience? Are they using that experience to tutor the inexperienced?

It wasn’t until my fifteenth year teaching that I realized Dorothy Sayers’s notion of a “pert stage” and a “poetic stage” simply did not correspond with what I saw in the classroom. She was on to something with the “poll-parrot stage,” but I think that stage goes all the way to age eighteen. Looking back, I had seen the pert stage and poetic stage were mere fantasy much earlier in my career, but it took me years to put two-and-two together because so much of how I understood the classroom was filtered through the claims or inexperienced theorists.”

-from Put The Trivium On Ice And Cover The Basics First, my latest for CiRCE