I’ve joined a great books book club, and my first experience as part of this small (very small) group was invigorating. The preparation was intimidating, as I was jumping into a group that was already established, and indeed works from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to The Republic were already in […]
Bringing The Guitars Along
I have two guitars that have been following me around for the last few years. They have had to follow me from Asheville to Cleveland to Atlanta. They are patient, shut up in their cases. So cool leaning against the wall like cowboys, they have been hanging out in the guest bedroom waiting for me […]
Jim-Jim’s Barbecue: Poor Spelling Doesn’t Affect the Cue
Over Memorial Day weekend near Norris Lake, my wife and I went to a very small Barbecue place called Jim-Jim’s. It would be possible to miss it as you drive by on Tennessee Highway 61 on the way to Big Ridge State Park. Clearly run on a shoestring, the pulled pork sandwiches were really quite […]
Goodbye Doc Watson: Feeling the “Deep River Blues”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyQOCJ4SUSk&w=420&h=315]It is a short list of voices and sounds really—the ones who have stuck with me, the ones I can trace back to my teens. John Prine, Neil Young, Bob Dylan, John Starling, John Duffey, and Doc Watson. Today Doc passed. It was a better world with him in it.I first saw him in […]
A School Person’s Compass Points: Essential Advice to Center Our Work
Before I took a new post at Hawken School, I wrote the first draft of what has evolved into what I have included below. Initially, I did this simply as a means to articulate what is most important in my work in a school. I had been at Asheville School for a decade before making […]
An Essay Grading Criteria for High School
[Around 1998, as part of an effort to make the evaluation of Senior Demonstration essays more consistent at Asheville School, I wrote a grading criteria that over the years evolved into the document that follows. When we took the step of creating a Humanities Department out of the faculties of both the History and English […]