Browse Topics
Education
The Miracle In Front Of You
Raymond Barfield On Practicing Medicine With Compassion
You have to notice beauty when it appears. That means you have to show up and shut up. If I could give just one piece of advice to all medical students, I would say, “Show up completely, and then shut up for at least two minutes while the miracle in front of you tells you who they are and how you can help them.” If every doctor did just that one thing, it would change medicine.
January 2016
When Words Are Scarce
There are no children’s books in your house growing up. No dictionaries. No encyclopedias. Not even a Bible to skim through. Your main reading material consists of Catholic leaflets given out at Sunday Mass.
December 2015
About Winning
As the girls and I carry the boat on our shoulders along the river, spectators who would have slapped our backs and beamed if we had gold slung around our necks just let us walk by. I understand now why he hates losing so much, why he refuses to let us do it: we are suddenly unremarkable, and we have made him unremarkable, too.
December 2015
Plagiarism
It wasn’t even lunch yet, and Helen had a plagiarism situation on her hands. Becky Fairchild: chipper with lots of teeth, field-hockey captain, hair ribbons in Hadley Academy colors every Friday, scones and effusive thank-you notes for teachers at Christmas, clothes from the kind of catalogs that Helen sometimes flipped through wistfully on the toilet.
November 2015
You Really Have To Stop The Killing
“Look, I’m not trying to be the ‘administrator’ here,” he says. He tells me that a student of mine has complained. This student felt uncomfortable with last week’s homework assignment: Attend a stranger’s funeral.
August 2015
Sunbeams
May 2015We spend the first twelve months of our children’s lives teaching them to walk and talk and the next twelve years telling them to sit down and shut up.
Beyond Their Years
Linda Kreger Silverman On Understanding Gifted Children
We say children are gifted when their intellectual ability is advanced beyond their age. A four-year-old girl who can pass all the items on an IQ test that an eight-year-old is expected to be able to do would obtain an IQ score in the 200 range. Children who are developmentally advanced are out of sync with their peers, and also out of sync with the expectations of teachers and parents, which leads to vulnerability. They need individualized education and counselors who understand how to work with these children.
May 2015
Almost Unendurable Beauty
The plastic prescription vial contains thirty doses. I press the cap down, twist it counterclockwise, and shake a cylindrical pill into my hand. It is an ugly gray, like dryer lint, like newly poured concrete, like a bullet. I know my daughter will notice this.
May 2015
Shakespeare’s Sister
excerpted from
A Room Of One’s Own
Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her.
April 2015The Hand We’re Dealt
Dalton Conley Asks Why Some People Get Ahead And Others Fall Behind
Only two measurable socioeconomic aspects of the parents really matter in predicting who succeeds: the parents’ education, which is the most important, and the family’s wealth, which is the second most important. By “wealth” I don’t mean how much the parents make a year. I mean net worth, including savings, property, and other financial resources.
February 2015
