Tag: reading

The Habit of Reading: Five Book Recommendations for 2023

It’s January of a new year! And so you are probably inundated with a number of calls to implement new habits, to try new practices, and to start new programs. Hopefully this list of recommended reading for 2023 cuts through the noise and provides you with at least one great read for the upcoming year. C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man I begin with a book that rivals in many ways the essay by Dorothy Sayers that got our educational renewal movement started. In fact, C. S. Lewis delivered these lectures (the Riddell Memorial Lectures were a series given over

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“Education is a Life”: Igniting a Love for Learning in the Classroom

“’Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life’––is perhaps the most complete and adequate definition of education we possess. It is a great thing to have said it; and our wiser posterity may see in that ‘profound and exquisite remark’ the fruition of a lifetime of critical effort (Charlotte Mason, Parents and Children, p. 33). In this series, I have been exploring Charlotte Mason’s notion that education should be approached through a trifold lens of atmosphere, discipline, and life. Stemming from her view of children as persons, Mason argues that we are limited to three and only three tools to

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Practicing Peacefulness: Beginning the School Year in the Right Frame of Mind

With the start of school just around the corner, teachers are gearing up for another year. As usual, summer break has gone by too fast. And yet, at the same time, the attraction of new beginnings lures them back to the classroom. There is something about a fresh start that energizes, awakens, and inspires.  How can teachers approach this year in a way that is different from the past? Experienced teachers may have a good idea at this point what their growth goals are for the year. To be sure, taking inventory of one’s skill in the craft of teaching

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To Save a Civilization, Part 2: The Road to Rebuilding

In my previous article, I reflected on the nature of civilizations: how they emerge, what they are built upon, and why they fall. I specifically examined the story of the fall of the Roman Empire. While it is difficult for historians to identify a single point in time when the decline began, various cultural, moral, and economic factors interweaved to ripen the moment for Rome to fall. And fall it did, ushering in a two hundred year period known as the Dark Ages. While the Middle Ages themselves span a period of one thousand years, many of which were full

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On Deep Reading

In an age of misleading news articles, vicious discourse, and exponential ignorance, it is a curious fact that the skill of reading continues to take the backseat to other “practical” areas of study. Society, it seems, would rather have students master Microsoft Excel or how to program computers than they would become lectiophiles. Reading is discarded as an antiquated art, a skill for a bygone area, whose value is akin to a penny: sentimentalized yet basically obsolete. At the same time, no one explicitly endorses the excision of reading from the curriculum as they would the penny from U.S. currency.

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Old Books, the Antidote to Our News Feeds

So much has changed in life during the span of time I have worked in education. Consider the enormous role social media has played since the turn of the century. It has become something like the social operating system for a new generation of students who have never known life without it. Or think about how the smartphone has become something like a new appendage. We are constantly connected to the internet, running our lives from the device in our pockets. These technological transformations have not only changed society, they have changed us as people. And we need to ask

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Enjoying the Bible as Literature: 5 Strategies for Engaging Students in Reading the Canon

Guest article by Heidi Dean of Christian Schools International (See Jason’s article on CSI “7 Steps to Narrating the Bible”!) In biblical studies we seek to cultivate the habits of reverence, humility, submission to the text, and other qualities of faithful scholarship. But I propose another goal should rise to the top: enjoyment. The enjoyment that students have in reading a novel, or an eerie poem, or an adventure epic.  When students are engaging with the Bible, we should hear laughter and gasps. We should see quizzical eyebrows and wide-eyed shock. I love to see students jumping out of their

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STEM careers scientist in a lab lost in flow of thought

The Flow of Thought, Part 4: The Seven Liberal Arts as Mental Games

There’s a lot of talk these days about the war between STEM and the liberal arts (which we are meant to understand as the humanities generally). Often this gets posed as a trade-off between a utilitarian education—training our future engineers, scientists and programmers—vs. a soft education in human skills and cultural awareness. Given the hype for STEM, defending the value of the humanities (as Martin Luther did, for one) is an important move in the broader education dialogue. And it’s one that’s not very hard to make, when there are articles like this one on how Google was planning to

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an elegant oval library, the perfect place for deep reading

The Importance of Deep Reading in Education

Deep reading is the type of reading that involves one’s undivided attention in a sustained manner to tackle a long-form book, like a novel. The feeling cultivated by deep reading is that of being lost in a book, taken to new worlds, enraptured by an alien train of thought. While many educators still feel that the importance of deep reading for education can hardly be overstated, that it is sacrosanct, the end-all-be-all of education, the winds are blowing a different direction. Beyond the basic literacy taught in early grade-school and the short-form, though still highly complex, reading skills needed to master

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