Moderately Radical Reason on Teaching and Learning.
View from Chair 3, late morning on June 18, 2017 (Video).
A spectacular evening bike ride. June 17, 2017
Mammoth’s back side avec: finger. Finger makes a cameo appearance for 31 second and then goes away. Video taken June 17, 2017. (It was too much of a hassle to do it over and try not to get the thumb.)
(This is the text of a little chapel talk I was asked to give on the theme of our school’s erstwhile Latin motto.)
First, the translation: Esse quam videri means “to be, rather than to seem.” We might also say, “To be rather than to appear to be,” or “value the authentic over the superficial.”
It’s a fine motto for any occasion, but I especially think it’s an excellent guiding principle for a school. Continue reading “Esse Quam Videri”
According to the National Association of Independent Schools’ Commission on Accreditation, twenty-first century students are qualitatively different from all students before them:
Continue reading “Think You Know How Your Students Feel About Technology in School?”
I was asked to contribute a little talk to a school assembly on the theme of being an outsider, so this is what I said: Continue reading “On Being an Outsider”
Too long, didn’t read? Here’s a summary:
The American college admissions process has became a zero-sum, Hobbesian, juggernaut. Advanced Placement classes proliferate to serve the insatiable gods of Achievement and Rigor, and panic attacks, sleep deprivation, and depression are as common in high schools as iced lattes.
Then suddenly a few years ago, adults in and around education started talking about teaching kids “how to fail” and urging students to “embrace failure” as though the grade-obsessed, high-stakes lunacy that is secondary school culture in America is somehow the kids’ fault. Gosh, they’re just such perfectionists; I wonder why they can’t seem to relax?
The academic summer vacation is a long, tranquil mix of relaxation and productivity. Murder mysteries vie for attention with monographs, time with family alternates with professional development, and the active badgers the contemplative to get up and out, exploring and doing. Active, we’re nagged by a feeling of intellectual irresponsibility, while contemplative hours feel physically slothful. For three months we strike an easy balance, made all the more sweet for being finite. And each August announces the end of the idyll with an ivory-colored envelope containing the beginning-of-year faculty meeting agenda.
Continue reading “Becoming Better Together: Re-Thinking The Faculty In-Service”
