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Bad Books Promiscuously Read: A Reflection on Assigning Objectionable Texts...
hen we set rules about what can and cannot be read, we may indeed be shielding students from falsehood and sin, but are we not also limiting the ways that they can learn to distinguish what is true and...
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Balthasar Sandbox 3: Tuning Students to the Beautiful
Last week I concluded with Balthasar’s description of the challenges we face in “tuning” ourselves and others to the key of divine beauty. This is particularly difficult at universities that, on the...
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In Praise of Inefficiency
Ask anyone who knows me (or better, ask my wife), and they will tell you that efficiency isn’t my strong suit. In our fast-paced, results driven world, my inefficiency is a supreme liability. My iPhone...
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Balthasar Sandbox 5: Sacramental Education
Today I want to finally bring these reflections on Balthasar and beauty to bear more explicitly on the subject of education. My efforts to do this were helped greatly by a handwritten letter I received...
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Balthasar Sandbox 6: Forming the Beholder’s Eye
This week I was talking about beauty with my freshman writing class to prepare them to evaluate a work of art. When I asked my students to define beauty several of them predictably claimed that it was...
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Do Androids Worship in Electric Temples? (Part 1)
Science fiction has a deep and abiding interest in religious matters. But why this interest? And what makes science fiction qualified to address it in a way that will profit our students?
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Do Androids Worship in Electric Temples? Part 2
This is the second part of a two-part series on an interdisciplinary course I taught with a colleague this semester: Do Androids Worship in Electric Temples? Science Fiction through the Lens of...
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Alan Jacobs on Trigger Warnings
Earlier this summer, I started a post about trigger warnings. As I combed the internet doing research, I stumbled across this gem by Alan Jacobs. In this post, Jacobs talks about guiding students...
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Is Belief Bad? An Open Letter to First-Year Composition Students
Our culture says that only thing we can know to be absolutely true is factual data. Our culture says that belief and opinion are largely valueless, better kept to ourselves than asserted as truth. Yet...
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The Dubiousness of Leadership
I’ve been thinking about leadership lately. I’ve been writing lots of letters of recommendation, all of which have asked me to evaluate a student’s “potential for leadership.” I’ve also been working in...
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The Long Way to Learning: A Story
The truth is, becoming a better writer is not something that happens overnight. We expect it to, deluded by a society which offers 10-week fitness plans and pizza on delivery into thinking that the...
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Student Resilience and the Threat of Bad Grades
Yesterday, Megan Von Bergen published a helpful essay on learning. There was also an interesting article by Peter Gray over at Psychology Today on the lack of emotional resilience in the student...
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Humility in Teaching
What was making Intro to Literature rocky was not my students, it was my own ridiculously lofty dreams for the course. This is a good reminder that humility is an underappreciated virtue in teaching.
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Marking Gratitude: Rethinking Plagiarism
When I discuss plagiarism with my students, I’ve learned to expect lots of questions. They are incredibly anxious about identifying the elusive line that separates theft of another’s ideas from proper...
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Gift, Studiousness, and Core Values
There are a number of things I appreciate about Paul Griffiths’ Intellectual Appetite, but chief among them is his treatment of the intellectual and spiritual dispositions that fit the Christian way of...
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Thoughts on Academic Community
Wendell Berry writes* that there is “a kind of knowledge, inestimably valuable and probably indispensable, that comes out of common culture and that cannot be taught as a part of the formal curriculum...
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To My Students: I’m Proud of You
My job as a writing teacher means I give a lot of constructive-criticism type feedback. This is a necessary part of the job, since you wouldn’t improve if I only praised your writing. But praise is...
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Educational Technology’s Inflated Promises
I recently came across a slender book that aims to redesign liberal education using digital technologies. Titled Open and Integrative: Designing Liberal Education for the New Digital Ecosystem, it...
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