This started off as an introduction to my talk at the Learning Well retreat, but grew too unwieldily. It got the ax in my presentation, but now finds a home here. Learn more about the upcoming retreat at the end of the post! So. When my oldest child was 5 years old – 10 years…
A commonplace is a notebook for keeping favorite quotes, inspiring ideas, or thoughtful notes. It’s a highly individual practice that has been used by “keepers” of all walks of life for nearly as long as the means to conveniently and cheaply read and write have been available. It’s making a resurgence in the classical education…
Have you ever walked into a conversation halfway through? Perhaps, unbeknownst to you, it was a conversation that had been going on sporadically between these friends for weeks or even months. It’s a fascinating conversation, let’s say, and one that you want to at least listen to, maybe even participate in, but you feel like…
There is so much to keep track of at home. Not only does everyone want to eat three times a day, but the house also has a fast trajectory down Entropy Lane. There are apps for home routines. But will we really check yet another app consistently and regularly? Do we need one more place…
Brandy started it all, of course. My reading for the last year or so has been spotty and haphazard and I’d been wanting to get more intentional and deliberate about it. So when I saw Brandy’s post, I realized it was time to revive my practice of “multiple streams of reading.” If all my reading…
I recently finished Laurie Bestvater’s The Living Page: Keeping Notebooks with Charlotte Mason, and I loved it. I bought it based on Brandy’s reviews, and I’m glad I made the leap-of-faith, even though I am only a Charlotte Mason admirer and not a strict adherer. I think this book, with the history behind commonplace books…
This summer I read John Owen’s Mortification of Sin. I enjoyed the delve into older, denser English. There were several places where at first I was a little taken aback at his line of argument, but after continuing on and thinking about it, I realized it was more that he was not saying things the…