Romano Guardini (1885-1968) was a German Catholic priest and philosopher who was one of the most important influences on Catholic intellectual life in the 20th century. His work influenced Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict) and Jorge Mario Bergoglio (later Pope Francis), who made Guardini’s work the focus of his doctoral dissertation (which was never completed). ...Read More
I’ve been reading a lot of posts on Twitter from parents who are not happy campers. They didn’t plan on serving as ad hoc teachers for their out-of-school students during this pandemic. Some are discouraged, others are exhausted, still others don’t know where to start. For those parents who have these burn-out symptoms and can manage...Read More
Reading is such an important part of the educative process, and whether your child is engaged in a school-directed distance learning program, or you’re creating your own homeschooling or unschooling program, literacy activities (reading, writing, speaking, listening), are likely to be a major part of whatever form these programs happen to take. However, there are...Read More
Parents have a wonderful opportunity during this interval when their kids are at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic to nurture their kids creativity. This isn’t something that the schools really put an big emphasis on (in fact, studies suggest that teachers would prefer not to teach creative kids because their outspokeness and out-of-the-box thinking...Read More
Many parents are doubling down on their kids’ homeschooling and/or distance learning schedules, trying to make sure that they’re getting the same academic ”rigor” as they got when they were in school. This may be a laudable objective, but it can easily run into problems. Homes are not set up like schools, consequently it’s inevitable...Read More
The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961) did not formulate a specific stage theory of the human life cycle as did his mentor Sigmund Freud who theorized about the stages of psycho-sexual development (oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital). However, throughout his life he gave us hints and insights into the chronological features of the human...Read More
I’ve been reading in the news the past week about educators who are concerned that with school closures going on until at least the fall, kids are in danger of undergoing ”backsliding” even more severe than occurs during summer vacations. I want to challenge that idea. In my mind, if students ”lose” knowledge after three...Read More
With all the time that’s been freed up from having to go to school due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many kids are taking online lessons directly from their school, others are engaged with formal or informal homeschooling programs, and still others are just taking it easy and ”chilling.” In the midst of all this activity...Read More
I’m not a big fan of the ‘science of reading’ mainly because phonics or phonemic awareness as it is sometime called, is usually presented in a very boring way using flash cards (sh + ah + puh) or combining phonemes on computer screens in the context of a ”fun” cartoonish game. But when I was...Read More
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