A New Philosophy of Blogging

As mentioned a while ago, I’ve been giving some thought to a redesign – both in terms of the appearance/layout of the blog and the thinking behind why I’m doing this. If you’ve visited the site recently, you’ve probably noticed that I’ve hit the appearance/layout redesign and I’m pretty happy with it.
As for the philosophical [...]

Six Great Ideas – Journal 2

“Six Great Ideas,” by Mortimer J. Adler – Chs. 3-4
QUOTES:

“Precisely because it can be everybody’s business, it should be part of everyone’s general education…Only by the presence of philosophy in the general schooling of all is everyone prepared to discharge the obligations common to all because all are human beings. Schooling is essentially humanistic only [...]

The Great Ideas

I just started reading a book that’s been on my Shelfari “Plan to Read” shelf for about a year. It’s called Six Great Ideas by Mortimer J. Adler. As I started reading this book, I realized that it touches on both of my academic passions: literature and philosophy (more of the latter, to be sure). [...]

Teachers of Philosophy

One of my lesser-known passions is the study of philosophy. Along with English, I double majored in Philosophy in college. I student-taught in an International Baccalaureate Philosophy class made up of 11th and 12th graders. I wrote my Master’s Thesis on methods for developing critical thinking skills in high school students, and one of the key [...]

Goals for This Year

I just had my annual goals meeting with our administrator and thought it would be worth sharing the three goals I’ve set for myself this year. They’re each fairly specific and I’ll probably be inquiring about other teachers’ solutions to these in the near future.
1. Develop a stronger understanding of how to teach the writing [...]

OpposingViews

Courtesy of @edu and Webware, I’ve seen two posts recently about an impressive site called OpposingViews and I just had to add my two bits.
This past year, one of the most successful activities we did in my English class was a unit on rhetoric and argument, complete with a class debate, a devil’s advocate debate, and an [...]

Guilt By Omission

Let no one when young delay to study philosophy, nor when he is old, grow weary of his study. For no one can come too early or too late to secure the health of his soul. And the man who says that the age for philosophy has either not yet come or has gone by [...]

Future Gadflies of America

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” – Socrates
One of the greatest philosophers to walk the face of the earth was Socrates. He was inquisitive, patient, curious, and wise. He attacked the dogmatic assumptions and beliefs of his culture and encouraged citizens of Athens to truly think about what they believed and what they did. [...]

Finding Purpose

After watching Lilo & Stitch in class (5 times, I might add), I am still struck by a couple of really powerful scenes from the movie.
The first of these scenes is when Jumba is watching Stitch about halfway through the film.  He observes that “626 was designed to be a monster, but now he has [...]

On Happiness

Had an interesting conversation with some students today that got me thinking.  In discussing something, a couple of my students (9th grade boys) began saying that if they were like Jay-Z or Kobe Bryant, that they would be happy.  Given my natural tendency toward argument, I immediately put all else aside and pursued the discussion.  Essentially, [...]