An authentic, intellectually challenging education summons students to a difficult task, yes, but it also summons them to something real. Its arena is not the confined dimensions of a classroom or the fixed hours of a school day but the boundless world in which we live. True intellectual challenge is animated by the spirit of exploration; mere academic rigor by the specter of the grade.
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On Growing Up Today
Recent articles of note from the world wide web, all on the theme of growing up in today's world.
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“Cottonwood Grove Sonnet”
⎺Original Poetry from David Folks
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The Wait
Something is going on under a blanket of dead leaves and snow when we no longer expect anything. The false sense of fulness is being done away with, done to death by the cold hard season. Sorrow’s flower is in full, ice-crystal-fringed blossom. Perhaps it is not so much barren as bare. Spare.
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“The Flood”
⎺Original Poetry from J-T Kelly
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On Freedom and Architecture
Articles of note from the world wide web.
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Smoke as Motif
Was there, in all this tension, in the clenched, interwoven fingers of Cezanne’s motif, an expectation of inevitable release? An anticipation of relief? Like the relief that comes with clarity, even a terrible clarity. As I left, that impassive painting looked to me like the face of an aging dam.
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Chess, Jazz, and Renga
Each of these artists were working with an understanding that almost everything improvisational is ephemeral. Little lasts. Most is lost.
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On Qualitative vs. Quantitative Assessment
Numbers are not more real than words. On the contrary, the idea that a number like 82.3% could serve as a summary of student performance is the real problem. It cannot. What a student has learned is demonstrated in the skills, knowledge, understanding, and habits of mind he has acquired. Those skills are best understood linguistically, not numerically.
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On a Lifetime of Living Well
Articles of note from the world wide web, addressing the ways we narrate our lives.
