Save the date: July 8th and 9th, 2022.
Tell your friends. Full details will be available soon.
A Tale Of Two Writing Teachers
My latest for CiRCE is about two teachers, one who spends hours grading bad essays and the other of whom spends just a few minutes. Which teacher offers more help to her students?
Karl Marx On “Fiscally Liberal, But Socially Conservative”
“The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.”
-Karl Marx, The Communist Revolution (Penguin, p 243)
In other words, Marx didn’t believe a man could be “fiscally liberal, but socially conservative.” If you’re game for a new way of distributing wealth, you’re game for a new way of doing everything. “Where your money is, there your heart will be also.”
The Progressive Ethos
A more apt example of progressive politics is hard to find. Ten people die at a concert? Something must change. Doesn’t even really matter what it is. Any change pacifies a bored populace.
A Proposition For Fellow Teachers
One of the reasons there is so much acrimony about grades is because a 0 to 100 scale is way too broad. If you hate grades as they are, and I know you do, imagine how much less you would hate them if every grade was issued on a 1 to 3 scale. Suppose also that the final grade a student received (for the year) was not an average of all the earlier grades, but determined separately on a 1 to 3 scale.
Muppets Are Fashionable Again
I took the picture on the left at the Gap this afternoon.
The Love Of Learning Is Not A Virtue
“Thoughtful Christians rightly lampoon the vagueness and insipidity of secularist slogans like “Love is love” and “Be yourself.” And yet, to “love learning” is just as vague. Love learning what? When a certain student does not do his math homework and spends Latin class flirting with the girl beside him, the problem isn’t that he “doesn’t love learning,” it’s that he doesn’t love learning math and Latin, or that he doesn’t love his teacher enough, or his parents. He absolutely loves learning other things, though, like how to make a TikTok video that will go viral, or what sort of attention the opposite sex will most readily respond to. I can absolutely promise you the boy wants knowledge.”
-from my The Love Of Learning Is Not A Virtue, my latest for CiRCE
Losing Weight
“It is easier to be wise for others than for ourselves,” said La Rochefoucauld.
The new episode of Proverbial is available now.
What If?
I’m thinking about putting on my own online conference this summer.
For The Love Of God, We Need More Dancing
“Having abandoned the Incarnation, we now regard physical contact between persons as either sexual, violent, or an indication of sickness (a doctor touches his patient). However, dancing offers us physical contact with others which is generous, structured, mannered, and lively. A traditional dance neither incites sexual passion nor denies the sexual nature of the dancers. Rather, dancing sublimates our sexual nature to something higher than itself; when the dance is over, we understand our bodily natures more clearly, having trained ourselves to physically, actively respect the bodies of our fellows.”
-from my latest for CiRCE
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity. 