The Blackboard

Like the sonnet, the five-paragraph essay traps investment in truth felt in the heart and forged in the mind by means of its life-respecting limitations.

As C.S. Lewis noted in The Abolition of Man, the souls of our youth are not jungles that need pruning but deserts that need irrigation. We could start by getting them to hear music.

Our participation streak brought forward more diversity of opinion and expression in the classroom while forming the students into a team with a shared objective.

—it took 40 years for me to begin to realize these words Jim silently put into my hands on that last day of class were a prayer.

If you understand that a child’s growth comes from a spark within, just as does the growth of a flower, a crystal, or a mighty oak, you might take a more trusting view of a child’s growth.

How has your intellectual practice prepared you not just for success but also for failure?

In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem there. “That triumph” is the triumph of the way of love, the life of silence.

Let’s point to the wiser and the well off and ask people if they want what those people have–often they do. Many times, those people have a love for the liberal arts.

Reading for the shape of a life can be medicinal, especially when we allow that life to diagnose and heal ourselves. And maybe then that understanding can encourage doctors of all kinds–but especially scholars of the humanities–to think differently about their life.

Students sometimes come to us in crisis, but always they come from a world filled with challenges and are with us only for a season. We could do far worse as professors than to model our approach to education and guidance on Dante’s Virgil and walk with our students until another valley opens to them.