Life of the Mind: Brookewood & Avalon Schools

We've noticed a trend away from giving (high school) midyear and final exams--a shift we saw before Covid and see post-Covid--yet we still give exams.  An exam is a good educational tool that helps students synthesize material and it's good college prep as well.  Listen to David Booz, Shannon Garvey, and Liz Eames talk with me about their exam practices and how they contribute to the project of a sound high school education in which both content and skills are important.

Poet Sally Rosen Kindred (sometime Brookewood guest and judge for the Joseph W. McPherson Poetry Contest) and I talk about poetry in general, poetry memorization, poetry and growing up, and teaching poetry.  Then, Sally reads selections from her award-winning 3rd collection Where the Wolf, from Diode Editions.  I am sorry that my audio is a little weird on this one;  I think this is one of the best of the podcast conversations.

Avalon head Kevin Davern and Brookewood teacher (and longtime Avalon-Brookewood teacher/administrator and parent) John Acevedo join me to talk about chivalry in the 21st century.  I sound like some anthropological NPR reporter for a while, but then Kevin, John, and I talk about John Eldredge's book Wild at Heart, which takes an evangelical approach to discuss the roles of adventure, quest, and rescue in a man's life.

In our first live podcast, Glencora Pipkin and the Brookewood faculty (feat. Judy Kearns, Barbara Gagliotti, and David Booz) discuss Jessica Hooten Wilson's The Scandal of Holiness.  We explore UD connections and then talk about JHW's technique of reading literature the way we read an icon, as a kind of window to a way of seeing the world, with special attention to how literature can help us know how to live.

Andrea and I discuss Donna Tartt's The Secret History, a novel I have loved since it came out and which Andrea encountered through a book club.  This is not a book appropriate to be taught at Brookewood, but one for adults interested in family and friendship, in the consequences of actions.  The novel stands out for its memorable characters, its relationship to Dostoyevsky and to Greek tragedy, and its brilliant writing.  We have fun talking about it, and hope you'll enjoy our conversation.

David Booz and I talk (in his somewhat echo-y dining room) about Henry T. Edmondson III's 2006 book John Dewey and the Decline of American Education, a critique of Dewey that has become more relevant now as mainstream education has become increasingly devoted to social reform.  David and I talk about human nature, the goals of education, the role of teaching methods, and the importance of tradition.

Tom Tobin, Upper School English Teacher at Avalon, talks with me about Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, which won the 1962 National Book Award.  The novel's (anti-)hero, Binx Bolling, struggles between competing worldviews, on one hand, an abstract scientism and, on the other, a more humane vision, in a way that reminds us of Dostoyevsky even as Binx's conflict speaks specifically to issues that will feel very familiar in our own time.  Plus, in this episode, Tom does a convincing if brief Shelby Foote impression!

The tacit curriculum of a school is what it teaches through its culture.  Kevin Davern, Headmaster of The Avalon School, and I talk about the play between the spoken and tacit curricula at Avalon (and to some degree at Brookewood).  We talk about the origin of the tacit curriculum in the personalities of teachers, the values that give rise to the school in the first place, and features of school culture.  For me, the fruits of that tacit curriculum have been important to the growth in my own sons in their comfort with themselves and their confidence in taking risks and solving problems as well as in their ethical compass and experiences of the Faith.

Fr. José Medina talks with me about attention.  What makes certain words move people?  Fr. Medina says, after St. Augustine, that you will not learn anything you do not love.  We begin by talking about cultivating attention as a habit of mind, and our conversation goes from there to all kinds of places:  our classes, fasting, love, various gospel readings, the archetypal hero, Luigi Giussani, Simone Weil, Sherwood Anderson, and poetry.  

David Booz returns to the podcast to discuss Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away.