Joshua Gibbs

The end of the school year is the right time for a speech. It’s the time for teachers to make speeches to their students and for administrators to make speeches to teachers. You don’t need to take each student or teacher aside individually because the end of the school year calls for the sort of […]

I’d like to do something a little odd. I’d like to explain why I always have my shirt untucked at school. I’m about to graduate, I don’t have much to lose in speaking plainly with you people, so I’m going to do it. No doubt, you people have wondered why it’s necessary to tell me

At the crucial moment in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the titular king does something that very few “servant leaders” are capable of doing: he delivers a rousing speech. On the morning when the English are to fight the French at Agincourt, Henry overhears his cousin Westmoreland complaining about how few men they have. The English are

It is a more common fear among Christian high school students than you might think. In the last ten years, I have regularly encountered Christian teenagers who worry that heaven will either be boring or that it won’t be nearly as interesting as life on earth. This was also a worry of mine when I

Student: Can we talk about my grade in this class? Gibbs: Sure. Student: I don’t think my grade reflects my understanding of the material we’ve covered this semester. I understand the material quite well, but that’s not reflected in my grade. Gibbs: How do you know you understand the material well? Student: You can see

There are few things so rare as a real change of mind. A man may only change his mind once or twice in the whole course of his life. He may never change his mind. Why is changing your mind so difficult? As the reasons to change slowly amass, holding out against those reasons becomes

You attend a classical education conference this summer and, while perusing the speaker biographies in the conference program, you come across the following: “Harge Manning is the founder of the Diluvian Consortium, a group of Christian thought leaders who specialize in dynamic vision forwarding, cognitive missional flexibility, core value development, servant viral marketing ethics, and

When you think about the turn of the last millennium, you probably remember that whole Y2K thing, but there was another issue that troubled mankind during the leadup to January 1, 2000. It wasn’t nearly so vexing as the potential collapse of civilization, though I still think it fair to call it “a problem.” I’m

While it’s possible (hypothetically) to integrate history and literature, I nonetheless present the following talking points about the typical ways in which these subjects are commonly “integrated.” It is one thing to claim that history and literature are “integrated” in a single class and another thing to explain what this means. Most teachers who teach

A little more than half way through Plato’s Republic, Socrates says something that’s bold, honest, and dispiriting enough to send even the heartiest of high school teachers on a two-day bender: “Compulsory intellectual work never remains in the mind.” He means exactly what you think he means. You can’t force someone to learn anything they

On the first Christmas, Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt to avoid a bloodthirsty tyrant who planned to snatch away the life of Christ, and ever since then a surprising number of Christmas stories have dealt with thieving villains. It’s a theme hardwired into the holiday. The Devil steals the moon in Nikolai Gogol’s “Christmas