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Follow Your Heart: Good or Bad Advice?
I grew up in the 1990s, the heyday of Disney princesses, love stories with happy endings, and the self-esteem movement. I’m almost certain I owned a t-shirt that said “Flower Power” on the front in big, bold letters, and I wore jelly sandals during the hot summer months. I loved figure skating and inspirational stories–remember Chicken Soup for the Soul? And then Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul? One of the most popular phrases of the 1990s was “follow your heart,” an outpouring of the feel-good culture in which I was raised. As a young person, I didn’t take any issues with this idea. To me, “follow your heart” meant…
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Book Review: “True Life: Practical Wisdom from the Book of Ecclesiastes” by Carolyn Mahaney & Nicole Whiteacre
Introduction Have you ever felt like no matter how much you try to organize things, they never turn out quite how you’d like them to? Do you spend your life trying to make special moments happen, only to watch them slip through your grasp? Do you feel like life is an endless cycle of repetitive activities that you must do over, and over, and over again? How can you find joy when things go terribly wrong? True Life: Practical Wisdom from the Book of Ecclesiastes provides you with answers and encouragement from King Solomon himself, who had every earthly pleasure and found no satisfaction in any of it. “Vanity of…
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On a Sunday Morning
This week, I have two posts set to publish on Wednesday and Saturday. How exciting–two posts in one week! Both posts are on the same topic, but one is an essay and one is a poem. I hope they both encourage you to take your thoughts captive to Christ and to worship God in a way that honors him. Today’s post is a poem. *** On Sunday mornings, when I wake up,I wonder what I’m going to wear:The orange dress with the white flowers,Or the fuscia dress with the rouched-up sleeves?Then, it’s on to hair. Up or down? Should I wear my black barette,Or my giant turquoise claw?My kids are…
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Listening to Myself Sing
This week, I have two posts set to publish on Wednesday and Saturday. How exciting–two posts in one week! Both posts are on the same topic, but one is an essay and one is a poem. I hope they both encourage you to take your thoughts captive to Christ and to worship God in a way that honors him. Today’s post is an essay. *** One of the first lessons you learn when you join a choir is to listen to the people around you sing instead of listening to yourself. In fact, I teach my students the very same thing. When I notice one student singing louder than the…
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Rethinking My Definition of Rest
I was recently listening to an episode of the Educational Renaissance podcast titled “Desirable Difficulties.” The three educators who host the podcast often discuss how modern research and Charlotte Mason’s methods of education fit in with the classical model of education. They also cover a range of topics relating to education, from accredation to habit training. In this episode, they focus on challenging students in order to help them learn. At one point, they discuss how students’ energy levels wax and wane during a typical class period. I’ve noticed this in both my Music and Chemistry classes; Chemistry moreso because I teach it during the first period of the day…