Yes, we really did. Stay with me… In 1995, Denis John Adams was convicted for sexual assault. The odds against him, regarding a DNA match, were one in 2,000,000. This meant that jurors were two million times more likely to observe the evidence if Adams were guilty than if...
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“What could I say that would matter?” That was all I could think about as I stood before a crowd of 100 Haitians—all homeless, all living in tents. Their brown eyes pierced me—waiting, wondering, and desperately looking to me for something. I had been on a mission trip in...
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Last month, I wrote an article called, “How to Raise a Discoverer.” This month, I want to expand on that idea. Toward the end of the first article, I argued that Dorothy Sayers, Leigh Bortins, and Classical Conversations have equipped parents with the necessary tools that will help them...
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As many of you now know, we are expecting our fifth child this summer. Yay! As amazingly lovely as babies are, pregnancy can be just as strongly terrible for me—at least in the beginning and then again a little at the end. Besides being a physical battle for me...
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Let me state this plainly: the Challenge B tutor has the best position in Classical Conversations. We build mental muscle with logic, we train opinionated kids to argue, and we watch children grow up into young men and women attorneys who go into battle in a courtroom. Yes, I am a...
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And it came to pass, as her soul was in departing, (for she died) that she called his name Benoni: but his father called him Benjamin. — Genesis 35:18 (KJV) This seemingly inconsequential detail reveals to us the importance of names. With her dying breath, Rachel wanted to name...
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Is there harmony in this world? How does this harmony inform our actions as Christians? How does this harmony inform how we approach simpler, more familiar ideas and how we approach complex, less familiar ideas? Here at Rivendell, we just completed our mathematics module and it was full of...
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Writing well is an undisputed goal of excellent education. However, as with all things rich in character, the process of good writing bequeaths an even greater blessing. When we study formal writing using the five canons of rhetoric, we are also teaching our students to be proficient problem solvers....
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We engage in the art of rhetoric in order to persuade others to the true, the good, or the beautiful. Any act of persuasion that seeks to move someone toward the false, the bad, or the ugly—intentional or not—is an act of sophistry. What often moves or persuades someone...
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It isn’t news that video games are increasingly a part of our culture. But there’s been a surprising lack of thoughtful consideration regarding something so influential, and into which so much time is being invested. I don’t only mean that there aren’t enough parents saying “video games are bad”...
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Chapters Four and Five – Reading and Writing Three Big Ideas about the Three Rs by Cara McLauchlan “As parents and teachers, we can form intimate bonds with children by loving the books they love and listening carefully to their ideas.” – Leigh Bortins, The Question (pg. 76) Legend has it...
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Were you classically educated? Me neither! I have so much to learn! And I have been doing it through reading about classical education. I finished reading Climbing Parnassus: A New Apologia for Greek and Latin by Tracy Lee Simmons today. Yay! This book was handed out at my local...
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