A wise man will hear, and will increase learning; and a man of understanding shall attain unto wise counsels. Proverbs 1:5 (KJV) “Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.” – Henry Ford In Classical Conversations, we often speak of...
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Driving along the moon-shadowed roads out to the grassy football field north of town, I thought about how so many moms I know are consumed by worry. I see it on Facebook, I hear it at church and at community day. I’m not sure why the question got stuck...
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Have you ever felt intimidated by a book? Are there any authors who overwhelm you simply by reputation? Tolstoy perhaps? Famous for Anna Karenina and War and Peace, he is not exactly known for brief or immediately accessible literature. How about Nathaniel Hawthorne, Aldous Huxley, or T. S. Eliot? What about Charles...
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Growing up, I loved Wonder Woman. Not just a little bit, a lot. It helped having the weekly television show featuring actress Linda Carter with her lasso of truth, invisible jet, and shiny outfit, complete with gold crown. The true reason I liked her was that she was one...
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In the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, the debate raged over whether to fight and leave Great Britain, or to keep trying to work things out. (Sounds like a great issue for an ANI chart!) Patrick Henry stood up in St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia and...
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My wife Catie has always known me to care about music. In the time we have been married she has seen me care about music in ways that are good and in ways that are not so good. She has watched me grow in both my passion for and...
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Computers are everywhere. In fact, today most people have multiple computers. Some people have a laptop, a desktop, a phone, and a tablet. That makes four general-purpose computers at their disposal. This doesn’t even count the special-purpose computers that exist in refrigerators, vehicles, and televisions. Not only are computers...
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The Conversation Monthly Wonderstruck by Science “Life is at its best is an adventure, a voyage of discovery. What could be more gratifying than to discover, describe and explain some basic principle that no human being has ever understood before? This is the stuff of true science.” —Peter Doherty, The...
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When my daughter Gaeligh was two and a half, she received the complete set of Beatrix Potter books as a Christmas gift, and that January her favorite book became “The Tale of Samuel Whiskers”—a story we read, discussed, quoted, and reenacted many times over the upcoming months. She had...
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When my older daughter was young, one of her favorite movies was Apollo 13. I am not completely sure what the fascination was; she was too young by most estimates to really “get” the movie. At any rate, I spent quite a bit of time watching the movie, apparently internalizing...
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Below, dear reader, you will find notes, questions, observations, and hopefully, a few reasonable answers to the question, “How does one study science classically?” Instead of simply giving you a couple of answers from my readings and contemplations, I thought I would invite you into my invention—my search for...
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I loved my college and my Latin education. However, the education classes were not as fruitful as I had expected. I really did not learn what I needed to know about teaching techniques until I was out in the trenches. All the theory in the world does not really...
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