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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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…
The Contradictions within My Students’ Request for Diverse Curricula
The imagined student’s intentions are honorable: to promote racial justice. But when the conversation begins, she has already set herself against the teacher and the course. The task of the teacher is…
Why We Must Recover Thinking as a Practice
Thinking as a practice places a check upon the self. It offers us a way out of our "res idiotica." If our universities are faithful to their missions, they must foster conditions…
Loving Education in the Time of COVID
The virus has given us many headaches, but it is also giving us an opportunity as we re-evaluate policies and practices and seek to care for one another and for our students.
An Education That Turns on Affection
Alex Sosler compares online and in-person education. Paradoxically, when we embrace the limits of our embodied existence and learn with and from particular classmates in a particular place from a particular teacher,…
Why I’m Fasting From Analogies
Education in the age of COVID is an opportunity for teachers and students to investigate the role of language in an intense real-world situation. Rachel Griffis considers the prevalence of analogies and…
The Face of Education
As a new school year begins, Jon Schaff takes stock of the effects of Covid on education. Learning is relationship, and, if the point of college, as the very term “college” implies,…
A Comedy with a Sad Ending: #MeToo and Pope’s Rape of the Lock
Daniel Ritchie explores how the #MeToo movement affects our reading of Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock. In turn, this comedy with a sad ending offers us a sense of balance…
Teaching (or Cultivating) Sustainability (or Inhabitance), Ten Years On
As utopian as "religious education" and "local food tours" may seem, that doesn't mean we can't approach them with a hope for real formation work in mind.
Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man: How to (Actually) Save Humanity
An empathetic approach to the kind of lofty goals named by Princeton’s aspiration to serve “humanity” might empower talented young people to serve their communities rather than selling out for personal financial…
Common Arts Education: A Review
In a world mediated through technology, the common arts bring us into daily encounters with a material world where we have not made the rules. They orient us to truths outside of…
The Liberal Arts for Loss and Lament
The main posture of a liberal arts education is slowing down, rest, seeing. But if we just train students to only strive, reach, stretch for something more, then suffering will come as…
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