Today’s One-Liner (#243)
We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be paid for in strokes of daily effort. –William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals
Category: Teaching
Today’s One-Liner (#236)
A school should be the most beautiful place in every town and village—so beautiful that the punishment for undutiful children should be that they be debarred from going to school the following day. –Oscar Wilde,…
Today’s One-Liner (#225)
What I call “another sort of learning” is the finding and reading those seminal books that take us to the truth and order of things. ––James V. Schall, Docilitas: On Teaching and Being Taught
Faith and Testimony
As thousands of faculty committees have found out, “teacher evaluation” is a hopeless business. There is, thank God, no teacher meter, and there never is going to be one. A teacher’s major contribution may pop…
Gratitude/2
For my teacher Marc H. Ellis who gave me apt advice when I nervously started started teaching in 1997: “Don’t worry about what the students give to you. Just give everything you’ve got to your…
Harvard Joke about Jesus
“A fine teacher, but didn’t publish.” –Quoted by George Steiner, in Lessons of the Masters, p. 33. Steiner observes, “A cardinal definition of genius points, I believe, to the capacity to originate myths, to devise…
A Question from Lynda Barry
Emily Dickinson wrote at least 1,700 poems. Why? –Lynda Barry, Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor
Students/1
We Know In that spring semester courseThere were 40 studentsThe official limit was 35But I let more in Before starting The Book of MevI asked“How many of youHave known someone— A family memberA friend, a…
Another Class Is Finished
Appreciation is the sacrament. —Allen Ginsberg Another class is finished…the autumn one entitled “Facing the Future: Resources for a Rebirth of Wonder” “Rebirth of wonder” comes from lines in a Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem— “I am…
Recent Classes
Bob Dylan Approximately [Summer 2019] The Essential Edward Said [Summer 2019] An Introduction to Simone Weil: Concentration Is Consecration [Spring 2019] Ram Dass and Be Here Now: American Sadhana and the Search for the Real…