This will be the last post for this blog. My writing here has slowed to a trickle and I’ve decided to wrap it up. I continue to write my personal blog. There I often write about math or software development, but I also write about education, creativity, and other less technical topics. If you’re looking for a [...]

James Marcus Bach is a high school dropout who wrote an interesting book on education, Secrets of a Buccaneer Scholar. Here is an interview with the author. Bach is passionate about education, but sees schools as optional at best and harmful at worst. He is a well-educated man with no educational credentials. Bach attributes his success [...]

From “The Contemplative Pastor” by Eugene Peterson It was a favorite theme of CS Lewis that only lazy people work hard. By lazily abdicating the essential work of deciding and directing, establishing values and setting goals, other people do it for us; then we find ourselves frantically, at the last minute, trying to satisfy a half [...]

From Reinhold Niebuhr: Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act [...]

From mathematician Hermann Weyl: My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful.

From T. S. Eliot: I incline to come to the alarming conclusion that it is just the literature that we read for ‘amusement’, or ‘purely for pleasure’ that may have the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. It is the literature which we read with the least effort that can have the easiest and most [...]

The 7th annual Covenant Academy Golf Tournament will be October 23 at Longwood Golf Club starting at 1:30 PM. For more information, see the  tournament web site.

A recent headline from the New York Times proclaims Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom. There has been quite a bit of buzz about this article (or at least its headline) but not much analysis. Nicholas Carr looks more carefully at the original study and is much more reserved in his conclusions.

Dan Meyer explains how he teaches math in this presentation. At one point he says that what he knows about teaching can be summed up in three words: Be less helpful. He says teachers can be helpful in all the wrong ways by spoon-feeding students. Sometimes this help can be subtle, such as a teacher’s [...]

Some things are unimportant, so it’s important to get them right. Important because it’s unimportant