The Blackboard 102

To throw pedagogical punches is not to berate students; it’s to engage them in the ring. Most of them just need a nudge, a little jab that’s meant to be…

My mom knew that she could not transfer the entire corpus of Western thought to us because she didn’t have it. But she did have love

The basic principle of education is that you can’t learn anything you don’t want to learn

Similarly, I believe that most people can tell the difference between ugly and beautiful buildings.

it is through the arts alone that the various branches of learning touch human life.

It is not too much to say that everything in our culture pushes against habits

Conservatives should reconsider the lessons of Romanticism.

To rush AI into the classroom or into daily life is to put student well-being at stake. And as Kingsnorth reminds us, refusal to accept certain forms of technology can…

The promise of AI is utopian and seems futuristic, but its effects on the educational landscape will make students nostalgic for the pre-ChatGPT days of yore.

Like the sonnet, the five-paragraph essay traps investment in truth felt in the heart and forged in the mind by means of its life-respecting limitations.

As C.S. Lewis noted in The Abolition of Man, the souls of our youth are not jungles that need pruning but deserts that need irrigation. We could start by getting…

Our participation streak brought forward more diversity of opinion and expression in the classroom while forming the students into a team with a shared objective.

—it took 40 years for me to begin to realize these words Jim silently put into my hands on that last day of class were a prayer.

If you understand that a child’s growth comes from a spark within, just as does the growth of a flower, a crystal, or a mighty oak, you might take a…

How has your intellectual practice prepared you not just for success but also for failure?

In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem…

Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the…

Reading for the shape of a life can be medicinal, especially when we allow that life to diagnose and heal ourselves. And maybe then that understanding can encourage doctors of…

Students sometimes come to us in crisis, but always they come from a world filled with challenges and are with us only for a season. We could do far worse…

Preserving moral authority in schools would truly be something to cheer about.

It’s said that seeing is believing. And even sleight-of-hand may be caught in the act if you watch closely enough. But things began to change with the use of computers…

After years of research, I have developed a three-stage teaching method that breaks new ground in pedagogical theory: Stage 1: Pay attention. Stage 2: Be astonished. Stage 3: Tell about…

The unspent beauty of nature that Hopkins saw has much to teach us even if we’re not always paying attention. But paying attention is always better.

The frictionless existence we were promised, one that freed us from slavish obedience to place and tradition and family bonds, turns out to be one in which we amorphously float…