This will be the last post for this blog. My writing here has slowed to a trickle and I’ve decided to wrap it up.
I continue to write my personal blog. There I often write about math or software development, but I also write about education, creativity, and other less technical topics.
If you’re looking for a blog devoted to classical education, you may want to read Quiddity, the blog of the CiRCE Institute.
James Marcus Bach is a high school dropout who wrote an interesting book on education, Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar. Here is an interview with the author. Bach is passionate about education, but sees schools as optional at best and harmful at worst. He is a well-educated man with no educational credentials.
Bach attributes his success in part to his lack of credentials. Because he had no degree, he assumed he had a lot to learn. Most of his degreed colleagues felt they were done with their education.
(Incidentally, James Bach may be related to Johann Sebastian Bach. James Bach’s father is the author Richard Bach. According to Wikipedia, Richard Bach claims to be a descendant of the great musician.)
From “The Contemplative Pastor” by Eugene Peterson
It was a favorite theme of CS Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us; then we find ourselves frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half dozen different demands on our time, none of which is essential to our vocation, to stave off the disaster of disappointing someone.
But if I vainly crowd my day with conspicuous activity or let others fill my day with imperious demands, I don’t have time to do my proper work, the work to which I have been called. How can I lead people into the quiet place beside the still waters if I am in perpetual motion? How can I persuade a person to live by faith and not by works if I have to juggle my schedule constantly to make everything fit into place?
From Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own,; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.
Source: Quote Snack
From mathematician Hermann Weyl:
My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.
From T. S. Eliot:
I incline to come to the alarming conclusion that it is just the literature that we read for ‘amusement’, or ‘purely for pleasure’ that may have the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. It is the literature which we read with the least effort that can have the easiest and most insidious influence upon us. Hence it is that the influence of popular novelists, and of popular plays of contemporary life, requires to be scrutinized most closely.
The 7th annual Covenant Academy Golf Tournament will be October 23 at Longwood Golf Club starting at 1:30 PM. For more information, see the tournament web site.
A recent headline from the New York Times proclaims Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom. There has been quite a bit of buzz about this article (or at least its headline) but not much analysis. Nicholas Carr looks more carefully at the original study and is much more reserved in his conclusions.
Dan Meyer explains how he teaches math in this presentation. At one point he says that what he knows about teaching can be summed up in three words: Be less helpful. He says teachers can be helpful in all the wrong ways by spoon-feeding students. Sometimes this help can be subtle, such as a teacher’s face telegraphing the desired answer.
Some things are unimportant, so it’s important to get them right.
