As part of an update to the Board of Trustees of Asheville School, I included this statement in 2006:“In the Academic Office we have been thinking about a number of challenging questions. For example, as a faculty we have noticed that students are struggling, more than in the past perhaps, with the vast number of […]
Designing a Course Around an Object: Thinking Locally as a Way to Think Globally (Part Two)
In my last post, “Designing a Course About a Point on the Map: Thinking Locally as a Way to Think Globally”, I described a course centered around a specific location. The spark for that thinking was a purchase I made at an auction recently of a large pottery five gallon churn made by pottery makers Kline […]
Designing a Course About a Point on the Map: Thinking Locally as a Way to Think Globally
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about buying a five gallon Kline and Brown Churn at an auction in North Georgia. Upon doing some research I found that the churn, made in the mid-1880s, was turned at a shop very close where we live and that the clay was very likely dug out of […]
Becoming a Progress Culture: Keeping the College Process in Mind
I have written often in the last few months about the need to create a school Progress Culture. One of the issues that can paralyze discussions regarding how to move schools beyond the perceived safety of “what we have always done” and toward a progress culture, however, is the college selection process whose shadow stretches back […]
Purpose of Education?: “The World Needs You to be Smart”
[Last January I handed the following piece to the seniors in my 21st Century Short Fiction and Poetry Class. We were just about to finish a collection of short stories by Stephen Millhauser (Dangerous Laughter) and begin a poetry collection by Louise Gluck (A Village Life). A contemporary of mine at Sewanee, the author of the piece, […]
New Years Wish: Let Kids Wander
[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps?client=safari&q=grove+avenue+richmond+virginia&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&safe=on&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Grove+Ave,+Richmond,+Virginia&t=p&vpsrc=6&ll=37.578596,-77.513008&spn=0.065301,0.109863&z=13&output=embed&w=640&h=480] When there was time in the summer, and there was always time, I would ride my slick rear tired red Schwinn dirt bike down Malvern, across Cary Street and into Windsor Farms, and when I would get to the remnants of the Civil War trench works, I would gather as much speed as […]