The Blackboard

A.I. Doesn’t Cause Cheating. Fear Does.

Front Royal, VA. How do you catch a cheater? This is the question that is plaguing the minds of college and high school faculty...

One Homeschool Year: A Local Story in Four Seasons

One learning outcome I had in mind for this academic year was to teach all students to close the bathroom door when using the facilities. Alas, we seem to have failed at this. But our Greek curriculum has gone swimmingly.

Fact’s Two Faces: On the Masking of Children at School

Life is ambiguous, murky, rife with situations that elude dogma’s capture. When the seas get rough, however, our tolerance of this is one of the first things hucked overboard. For example: have we felt into what it’s like to be a five-year-old walking into school in the morning?

Fierce Velleity: Poetry as Antidote to Acedia

In “Lying,” the late Richard Wilbur diagnoses one of our age’s endemic ills with the paradoxical phrase “fierce velleity.” For those of us who...

With Students At Home, Let’s Make America Local Again

Perhaps we ought to hope that things won’t quite go back to what’s normal: rootless young folk siphoned away by elite universities and groomed to lead the managerial bureaucracies and mass popular culture that dominate our national life. The students who remain in their hometowns have the potential to restore declining local institutions and community associations.

The Classroom as a Welcoming Space

If we have all the knowledge in the world but have not love, the apostle Paul says, then we’re as annoying as a banging cymbal. It’s no wonder students wouldn’t want to listen to us.

The Metamorphoses and #MeToo

As difficult as some content is to teach, we have a responsibility to educate our students about the past, good and bad. A curriculum which leaves out the bad would gaslight our students.

Learning about Food and Proper Nouns

Berry moves the conversation from common nouns to proper ones and implicates us all in something deeply practical and doable, yet inexplicably difficult: to love our neighbor, the person right next to us, and the land beneath our very feet.

Early-Alerting Early-Alert Systems on College Campuses

The university’s best, most utopian aims must not beget dystopian early-alert policies that infringe on students’ personal liberties while turning campus into a place where everyone is an informant, and deviations from the norm beget Orwellian intervention.

Recapturing the Real: Physicality, Imitation, and Tradition in a Digital World

Our educational approach should include the validation of physicality, the imitation of the master, and the celebration of tradition.