There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.

What To Teach, Or How?

My latest for CiRCE concerns that most pernicious of issues within classical schools: Do we teach students what to think or how to think?

Parent: The grade you gave my son on his essay seems kind of subjective.

Teacher: No, it seems kind of low, and if I raised the grade it would be even more subjective.

“Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”
― Jacques Barzun

This is what The Wall Street Journal thinks homeschooling looks like.

Never ask students to do work in pairs that they could easily do alone.

If you only had ten minutes to assess the health of a classical school, what would you do? What would you want to see? Who would you talk to?

My latest for CiRCE deals with these very questions.

I have forced myself to listen to beautiful music lately, though this one goes down quite easily.

One of the books which inspired The Grand Budapest Hotel. I just began it this morning for the third time in as many years.

Not since Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has a work of modern fiction broken my heart so meticulously.

The teacher to the student: Can you not write a single paragraph without becoming bored and checking your phone?

The student to the teacher: Can you not grade a single essay without becoming bored and checking your phone?