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 […]
If We Want Them “To Serve and Lead,” What Then Must We Do?
[This piece appears with a different headline and in a slightly edited form on the last page of the latest copy of The Westminster Magazine.] Last week I hosted eighteen freshmen in my office for lunch. I have been hosting these lunches as a means of getting to know students and as a means of developing a […]
Poetry Party? Yes, By All Means
My daughter awoke before us this morning–not long before. In fact, I had taken out our dog, Mic, quite early as he stays on the work week wake up timing even when I let go of it for the weekend, and I fell back asleep for another hour and a half or so. She told […]