I got up to teach the morning the Twin Towers fell. The buildings were burning when I had to walk to work stunned. Who did it? How many were dead? Were we at war? As I got to my office, two college students sat at a fountain and I heard them speaking: “Twin Towers. Twin Towers. That’s all that is on television. Now that’s all we are going to hear all week.” These students were bored with 9/11 on 9/11.... Read more
Formal logic is a fierce guide to validity. Move an argument from prose and analyze it and you will often discover better rhetoric than logic. Most students (though not here!) are only taught “informal” or baby logic. The day an informal fallacy is taught to a student in junior high is the day they gain a super power, but with great power (I am told) comes great responsibility. Rushing home and telling your Mother she has engaged in a false... Read more
I know: he was a secular humanist, taking the Christian humanism of Erasmus and stripping it of Jesus. A good guess is that he confused secularism with short skirts on women and a rejection of sex rules. Gene Roddenberry was no saint of the Church. Still: thank you Gene Roddenberry, because you were a humanist: better secular humanism than the hopeless, visionless new atheism. His fifty-year old creation: Star Trek, gave my generation a hopeful vision. To quote the title of an old... Read more
I love the story of David and Goliath. I promise I do, but there is only so many times you can tell the story before wishing for something (anything!) different. My family is full of story tellers and there are few things more illuminating than a good tale, but to tell a story well requires both the listener and the speaker to develop a good vocabulary. In fact, if life is a story, then facts are the substance of the... Read more
Our school is building a fence, though we are paying for it. The fence is defining where the school is and where it is not. The Bible has hero wall builders like Nehemiah and Homer writes a lot about walls and what they mean to civilization. Civilized people are wall builders, while barbarians drift. Being civilized gives a person tools to find wisdom, practice greater virtues, and find joy in finding beauty. Civilization also fills a man with discontent, endless... Read more
Want a hot argument? Pick a school canon! Whatever the reading list your school selects, the school will have left out hundreds more worthy books than it can pick. This is true, even if you have kindergarten through college! There is simply not enough time to read all the good books that have been written or even the books that we should read. Given this fact, teachers and professors begin choosing with humility what students will read. No list is “complete.” No... Read more
Long ago I had a student in Spanish who asked me: “Why can’t they just speak Real?” I wondered what she meant and then I realized that she meant . . .English. At her age this was harmless enough. She had known few people who did not speak English as a first language in her hometown of Rochester, New York, and so she assumed English was the default language for everyone. This poor student was speaking from her experience, but... Read more
The most dangerous thing my wife ever placed in our house was a headboard with a shelf. Every night my near sighted self is tempted to place objects on this shelf and if you have never been hit in the head by an early iPad, then you do not know how Steve Jobs lied about the weight of the first devices. Now imagine a giant mug of The Saint Constantine School perched perilously above your head and the image of... Read more
We need to see the man, say what incantation is necessary to be the man. Homer’s Odyssey begins: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, Of the man to me speak, Muse, “many ways” Notice that the Muse comes between the man and his chief characteristic in the order of the words of the line. The man is a man of many ways (“tricky” like Brer Rabbit). Even the trickster runs out of tricks when facing the gods or fate. Our hero is like... Read more
My Mom would send me outside, despite protests, and tell me to come back when the street light (yes, singular) came on. I might dam the “creek,” a rivulet so small that it was often dry, but seemed to me a major body of water or build a “fort,” but come inside? No. As for dirty, when Dad cut the grass, we would roll down the hill until we turned green. Grass stains are forever . . .sorry Mom. Imagine... Read more
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