By Kevin Thames You are standing in the hallway, outside your classroom door, saying goodbye to your students as the school day has come to a close. Your students are on their way to their lockers as parents are entering the school to pick up their children. You happen to see one of your students’ parents. You throw out a, “How are you doing this … Continue reading Relational Communication: A Battle Between Time and Cultivation
Thank God I still read because I want to read. I’m sure it’s the best kind of pressure—the pressure to read, that is. But if ‘positive’ peer pressure had its way, I fear I would drown in leadership books about how to accomplish more by doing less (or some such). My own ideas for books on leadership 14 school-years later are closer to: Launching a … Continue reading My Top Five Books of 2019 (Nathan Carr)
Guest Author, Jenny Solomon “What’s a casket?” Those four words clatter onto the dinner table like a dropped fork. You are a young boy asking a simple question. I pause to look you over—noticing the mouth those words come from. It’s a mixed-up assembly of full grown and babies. One of your loose teeth dangles, hanging on by a thread. The next bite of the … Continue reading “What’s a Casket?”
The Case for Classical PE Jenny Crockett A more classical PE? Can we really apply the classical model that we use in the classroom to physical education? Absolutely! Children today need the “lost tools” of a physical education more than ever. Physical literacy, understanding how and why the human body works and how it was created to move, is a vital skill that has been … Continue reading The Case for Classical P.E.
By Christine Norvell Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words. —Paul EnglePaul The more we read poetry, the more we appreciate what we read. Whether we read poetry for ourselves or teach it in any grade or subject, reading, appreciating, and understanding it is a skill that grows with experience. Over the … Continue reading Teaching Poetry
By Nathan Carr With an unobstructed view to Joy, let us go back to the first school tradition of the Christian Church—the monastery. How did the first attempt at formal Christian education enlist its students into the great “story being told?” Among the monastic schoolmasters of the 4th century—abbots and abbesses—one in particular gives profound insight into the formation of several abbeys throughout Egypt: St. … Continue reading Pachomius
By Ian Mosley, Instructor of Latin, School of the Ozarks When I was a fairly new-minted Christian, I was introduced to the concept of spiritual disciplines by the writers Dallas Willard and Richard Foster. Particularly Foster’s Celebration of Discipline helped me enter imaginatively into the role that practices and habit play in spiritual formation. In a culture like ours that values spontaneity and authenticity, it … Continue reading Teaching as a Spiritual Discipline
By Andrew Pyatt Central to the contemporary classical education movement is a profound appreciation and indebtedness to the past. This devotion to tradition contrasts with the progressivism of modern pedagogy, which views history in terms of an upward climb, an inevitable march of progress. Author and publisher for SLANT books, Gregory Wolfe, however, warns that an equally severe mistake threatens classical education. Wolfe (2017) argues … Continue reading Permanence and Progress: A Review
By Nathan Carr Vigen Guroian, in his Tending the Heart of Virtue, quotes Flannery O’Connor as having said the following: “a story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way….You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.” You are inviting the eye-roll in your three-year old classroom if you simply said, “Olive Kate, you are resisting my role … Continue reading Wake the Dead with Air Guitars: Adventures in Training 3-Year Old’s in Virtue
By Nathan Carr Tim Wu, a Columbia professor who has written an editorial or two for The New York Times, is concerned that America is losing her hobbies—more alarming, leisure altogether. To blame: “We’re afraid of being bad at them….if you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer … Continue reading Mere Mediocrity
By Jenna Carey, College of the Ozarks freshman and 2018 graduate of School of the Ozarks Coming from a classical education background, universal truth was ingrained in me as a foundational reality. When people ask if truth changes based on perspective, my initial reaction is to reply, “Of course reality doesn’t change. There’s only one truth and whether or not you accept it is up … Continue reading The Reality of Truth
By Jessica Burke Veith, Gene Edward, Jr. Loving God with All Your Mind: Thinking as a Christian in a Postmodern World. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2003. When I graduated from college, a sense of finality and relief washed over me. That stage of life was finally over. My education was done. Except, by the grace of God, it wasn’t. Shortly after my graduation, my husband started … Continue reading A Review of Gene Edward Veith’s Loving God with All Your Mind
The Classical Thistle 