In Jeanett DeCelles-Zwerneman’s instructive treatise, A Lively Kind of Learning: Mastering the Seminar Method, she makes an important claim about learning to read a work on its own merits, rather than with the prejudices that frequently arise out of one’s intimate knowledge of the author. She writes, Ray Carver was an alcoholic and Rousseau abandoned […]
We Are Humans; We Are Not Gods
I have been reading through Jorge Louis Borges’ Selected Poems. One of the poems to which I keep returning is one of life’s refrains. The poem is called Límites. It reminds me there is something human about boundaries because boundaries—be they natural or artificial (that is, political)—remind us of our own limits, especially the fact […]
The Real and Perceived Needs of Customers
More than five years ago now, I wrote a short post making the case that Teachers are in the Customer Service Business. Building on that idea, I would further argue that customer service ought to be a way of life, not the contrived attendance to a company (or school) policy. Providing good customer service simply […]
The Heart and Soul of Human Existence
As modern Americans, we have been conditioned to believe it is the “go-getter” who is virtuous. The person who shows up early, stays late, and puts in 40-plus hours a week at the office or factory is a first-world hero deserving of our admiration (Perhaps our real admiration is for the inevitable fat paycheck). Even […]
The Piety of Learning
The piety of learning is to fully and sympathetically comprehend the power of an idea or argument before engaging in critical analysis of said idea or argument. To really understand a point or position before critiquing its merits or flaws is the mark of a humble and learned man. This is the point of Socratic […]
Don’t Read My Blog Every Day!
…if you don’t want to. As a matter of fact, you may have only signed up for my Saturday Substack Newsletter, Rumbling Toward Heaven, and are now wondering why you’re getting something from me in your inbox on a Monday. Well, this is a courtesy email to let you know that I will be publishing […]
Raspberries and Writing
Writing, or content creation, is a lot like picking raspberries. If one picks the bushes clean of its best fruit every evening, like magic, when he returns the following evening he’ll find the bushes loaded with ripe fruit again. It will be as if the bushes had never been picked. With proper water and sunshine, […]
The Matter with History
Henry Ford once asserted that “history is bunk!” It seems he meant that we in the modern age need to forget the past and lean into progress. The unbridled irrationalists of our postmodern society might agree. But George Santayana wrote something to the opposite effect: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat […]
C. S. Lewis’s Confession to T. S. Eliot
In the open stanza of Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the narrator says, Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap […]
Two Books About Books
There have been two book discoveries that remain marked in my memory as being most serendipitous. The first—and I cannot recall how or from whom I discovered it—is the Education of a Wandering Man by Louis L’Amour. Ironically, it played a part in shaping my view of education. I say ironically because Louis Dearborn LaMoore […]