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CONTINUING IN THE WORD
Perspectives on Homeschooling and Classical Christian Education from Scholars Online
Latest Posts
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The Sherlock Holmes Law
I rather like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. I should also admit that I’m not a hard-core devotee of mysteries in general. If I were, I probably would find the frequent plot holes in the Holmes corpus more annoying…
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Reflections on Trisecting the Angle
I’m not a mathematician by training, but the language and (for want of a better term) the sport of geometry has always had a special appeal for me. I wasn’t a whiz at algebra in high school, but I aced…
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Crafting a Literature Program
The liberal arts are, to great measure, founded on written remains, from the earliest times to our own. Literature (broadly construed to take in both fiction and non-fiction) encompasses a bewildering variety of texts, genres, attitudes, belief systems, and just…
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To teach, or not to teach….to the test
In the last few weeks, I’ve spent considerable time updating my course websites for the 2020 summer session and academic year. This has been more complicated than usual, since I’ve decided, after considerable thought and inward turmoil, not to seek…
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Causes
The Greek philosopher Aristotle thought widely and deeply on many subjects. Some of his ideas have proven to be unworkable or simply wrong — his description of a trajectory of a thrown object, for example, works only in Roadrunner cartoons:…
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Time to Think
On average, my students today are considerably less patient than those of twenty years ago. They get twitchy if they are asked merely to think about something. They don’t know how. My sense is not that they are lazy: in…
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Autonomy of Means Again: “Best Practices”
When our kids were younger and living at home, they also frequently had dishwashing duty. Even today we haven’t gotten around to buying a mechanical dishwasher, but when five people were living (and eating) at home, it was good not…
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Bulletin for Seniors (and Juniors?) Interested in Ethics
The course on Ethics offered in the autumn is at a college level, so the work will be challenging and interesting. The text originally identified, Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, begins with the problem that the variety of moral beliefs, and…
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Cleaning up
The Scholars Online Database overflowed today, the result of spam user attacks and registrations on the blog. We’ve spent the day upgrading the Word Press release, installing CAPCHA requirements for registration, and reviewing tens of thousands of spam registrations. An…
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Socrates’ Argumentation — Method, Madness, or Something Else?
Many in the field of classical education tout the use of the Socratic Method, by which they seem to mean a process that draws the student to the correct conclusion by means of a sequence of leading questions. Whether it’s…
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The Divine Gift of Philosophy
CATCHY TITLE NEEDED We’ve been busy this year, and that’s taken its toll on publishing blog articles. Besides reviewing our options for accreditation, upgrading the Moodle and its theme, finding and supporting teachers and teaching our own classes, we were…
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Getting Started Asking the Right Questions
Recently on a homework assignment for my Natural Science course, I asked students to identify which solar system planets it would be possible to explore from Earth-based telescopes, which from space-born but Earth-orbit telescopes (like the Hubble), and which would…