When I was a boy I fancied myself a fair baseball player. I was the only 5th grader to make the first summer softball team at Lowell P. Goodrich Elementary School in Milwaukee where I played shortstop and scratched my ankle up sliding into second base on an asphalt baseball diamond. But, while I played […]
There are two common reasons for testing. First, the static fashion of determining roughly (and often rather arbitrarily) what students have learned and can repeat from the curriculum. Second, the dynamic fashion of assessing what has been learned so the teacher can adjust to the realities of the students’ experience. A third reason is, of
Here is a grammar teacher, let us call her Mrs. Malaprop. And here is a grammar student, let us call him Billy Blood. Mrs. Malaprop has been trained in the conventions of the contemporary University and has come to believe that correct grammar is determined entirely by the usage of the community and has no
The great need that Dorothy Sayers and classical educators have always claimed to meet is teaching students how to think. I’m still amazed, however, at how little of what schools do with their students actually trains them to do so. So much time is spent getting through materials and learning what they are supposed to
