Americans solve problems, explore new realms, and question authority. After all, the first European settlers on our continent crossed the ocean to find greater freedom and new opportunities. These adventurous, independent settlers and immigrants laid the foundation for American culture. Thus in America, we pay little attention to class...
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Many people loathe the idea of calculus. Even the name sounds tedious and difficult. Most people who have to take calculus in college will not use it on a daily basis. So why is calculus an important part of education? One of the goals of classical education is to...
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Music, amazing in its power over our emotions and character, is even more amazing because it is eminently capable of being studied. Traditionally, music is one of the seven so-called “liberal arts.” Liberal, here, has nothing to do with its current, political usage. It is not a synonym for...
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During week fourteen of Essentials class, we learn about passive voice. We practice taking a sentence in active voice and making it passive, and we take some passive voice sentences and make them active voice. From this point on, Essentials students will be rewriting sentences in passive voice for...
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One of my favorite scenes in C.S. Lewis’s novel, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, takes place when Peter and Susan have become concerned about the fantasy world of Narnia that their sister Lucy claims to have entered. They meet with Professor Kirke to get some advice. Here is a...
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Math is not scary. Say it with me: “Math is not scary.” Perhaps you might tell me you grew up believing your sister to be a math oriented person and believing yourself to be a language oriented person (and this is the reason you think math is scary). This...
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he ethical question “What should one do?”…elicits not only knowledge, but wisdom, and it draws the interest of the student into any subject, no matter how obscure or far removed from his day-to-day concerns. It challenges the imagination and makes life the laboratory it ought to be for testing...
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Winter is an underappreciated season. Many people see the landscape as barren, uninviting, and gloomy. I had a friend once describe winter as the “dead season”! I disagree. For me, winter is a season of gathering strength, building promise, and preparation for a new “bursting forth” that is all...
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“How many words can you write in a minute?” is not a question I often hear, even as someone who writes as a vocation. However, today while researching for the next set of books in the PreScripts series, I came across a quote that made me ponder this very question. A...
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Celeste F was homeschooled in rural Kansas. “The attitude that was put into what I learned was great,” she says, “Outside of math and English facts, it was the self-discipline, the character that was developed because I was homeschooled.” When asked if, looking back, she would have done anything...
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Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul. –Plato Music transcends the classroom, the concert stage, and professional recordings. It pervades life. Mankind has long used music in all sorts of ways, to celebrate, to lament, to dance, to pray, to soothe...
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doot de doot doot doot doot doo, do de doot doot doot doot doo, de-de-doot, doot de doot doot doo-doot doo-de-doo, do de doot doot doot, de doo-di da doo-di, de doot. That is my typographical interpretation of the Shire music from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings and Hobbit films. It...
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