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 […]
Ecclesiates 1:18 …Wisdom and Vexation, Knowledge and Sorrow: Bidding Farewell to An Essay Prompt
[In searching for some old documents related to our study of poetry in my English 9 class, I stumbled (can one stumble into an old computer file?) into an old exam question I used when I taught AP Literature. I like the question, and I used it in slightly varied ways over the course 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 […]
The 9/11 Seawall and the Figurative Seawall: The Empathetic Community
My mother posted the YouTube link I attached below on Facebook last week, and combined with a ‘thank you’ for a good faculty meeting last Tuesday, I forwarded it along to the High School faculty thinking that some faculty members might want to show it to their homeroom advisories at some point. “Boatlift”, the story […]
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 […]