The Blackboard
Teaching Like a Prize Fighter
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 blocked.
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AI, Misinformation, and Manual Arts Training
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 to produce…
Academic Joy
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 it.
Getting Our Feet Wet: Education from Down in the Creek Bed
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.
Craft and Theology: The Reason
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 about in…
A Renaissance is Upon Us
In this piece, I turn from the abstract idea of the marriage between the outer world of work and the inner world of the spirit to centers of education that are midwifing…
Craft and Theology: The Renaissance
It almost feels heretical to say that at the center of our religion, indeed our existence, is a God that can be wounded and broken, but this is precisely the Christian claim.…
The Art(s) of Liberation
None of us gets to choose where we land. But if we cannot choose the times in which we live, we can choose how we live in the time we are given.…
The College Diploma Shakedown
The aim is to get young people, of all backgrounds and races, on their feet with as little fuss and expense as we can, regardless of whether their families can afford the…
An Empty Room of One’s Own
There are things that a full room can do for us. It can reassure us. It can offer comfort. It can offer luxury and pleasant distractions. A full room can be cozy…
Why Pursue an Education?
The course I am teaching is part of the university’s core curriculum. Core comes from the Latin word for “heart,” I told my students. The same Latin root, cor, gives us the…
Planting Our Flag in the Real World: Parents Take the Postman Pledge
Do real things together. Celebrate. Take delight in the world—together. Don’t feel compelled to broadcast your views about the dangers of technology. Let your life speak, but be prepared to give an…
Apocalypse Now: ChatGTP and the End of Education
The intrusion of AI-generated content into the university sphere is a strange kind of judgement, even an old-style apocalypse, whose real gift is neither its productive power nor the opportunity it provides…
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