Anastasia Berg:

“Once we identify the problem—the sheer magnitude of what is being lost—it becomes immediately clear what any solution worthy of the name must accomplish: the hours must be recovered. How to do this is a good question. I have heard tales of complicated incentive schemes involving baroque grade distributions, of in-class writing samples used as internal benchmarks for outside-class writing, of Dead Poets Society reenactments. I don’t know that these won’t work. But I know what I think about when I confront this question: a big room. A pleasant-enough room with tables and chairs, and maybe some cookies at 9 p.m., budget permitting. A room that it is very easy for an instructor to require a student to spend time in—as easy as checking a box. A room with lockers for your bag, that you can walk into with just a book or a question to spend a few hours with, without distractions, without any offers of ‘help.’ Sometimes when I tell colleagues about it they express concern that requiring students to spend time in my room would feel punitive and paternalistic. But most people just say it sounds like heaven.”

Fordham debates holding onto its robust Jesuit core curriculum. I’m glad my daughter is starting prior to any dilution of its current structure. Christopher Cullen names the problem I see everywhere — words for the good used all over the place without any sustained examination of their root traditions:

“Taking general education requirements in ‘justice’ (merely one of multiple options for seminars) without a prior systematic and deep foundation of reflection on the question of ‘what is the good?’ and on the normative ethical theories that follow from this reflection will contribute to the incoherent discussions of ethics that transpire in the public square today. To debate justice, one must first know what the good is. Students will be using terms without really knowing what they mean, a malady that Alasdair MacIntyre famously diagnosed a generation ago. It will be like people using terms such as ‘neutrino’ or ‘atomic weight’ without ever having taken basic science courses, or like students doing algebra without ever having taken arithmetic. There is an order to learning in the sciences and mathematics. So too there is an order to learning ethics. The new proposal cuts out the basic ethics course and thus will send students to debate ‘justice’ with little idea of what the term may mean or of the sophisticated and complex millennia-long debates that have transpired over this very topic.

Furthermore, in the name of freedom for students, the proposed smorgasbord of courses will in fact imprison them in the ignorance of their own culture and civilization, not knowing who they are, where they came from, to what civilization they belong, or of what stories they are a part. Such general education requirements, masquerading as a core curriculum, will produce ‘hollow men.’ Hollow for many reasons—hollow for not knowing where or when they are but hollow also because they will never have engaged in the first task of education: ‘to know thyself,’ to explore the inward caverns that are the human mind and heart.”

The blog function on my web site is broken, and I don’t know why, and I don’t want to know why. I just want it to work. Something about Siteleaf and GitHub and repos, maybe. I’ve chatted with some backend help folks, but they can’t really see all the connections, and it’s just bumming me out to have a backlog and need to chase down these software details that come with being on more open web applications. I already wrangle way too many software glitches that are required in programs for my job! I like the spirit of open web tools, and I’m glad my designer set me up this way. He’s so great (and no longer doing web design, on to bigger things!). But I’m not sure I’ll do it again when I seek out a redesign soon. It might be Wordpress or similar again in the next go-round.

“It can be hard to fully appreciate this kind of design for the astonishing, radical statement in its provision: that the babies of strangers carry the kind of dignity that is tantamount to those of close kin and tribe. It’s an idea that had to be invented, that goes against the self-preserving optimization of communities adapted for fitness. This kind of dignity makes claims on a collective, perhaps a polity. “Design for dignity” is easy to affirm at the high level of uncontroversial principles, but in practice it too often takes on the straightforward structure of unidirectional charity, as though dignity were a good or service extended from those who somehow “have” it to those who somehow lack it. A sharper term from theologian Helmut Thielicke might get us closer to what’s true: Dignity is not a possession to be more fairly meted out but a universally contingent relational force—a bracing state of human dependency on divine sustenance, a vitality on which each human life hangs every second. Thielicke called this an “alien dignity”: the shape of a reality utterly not of our own making. Our task is first to recognize it before wielding it—to recognize it in ourselves as in others, and perhaps to recognize its force in the designed DNA of the inherited built world, a form of material argumentation that so easily goes to sleep in our imagination. You don’t need to have a maximalist theory of the state—either for or against—to see the sense of possibility on offer.”

I’m trying to think through my many still-forming questions for the domain of design in this essay.

A friend just shared this Christian Wiman poem:

No Omen but Awe

I thought it would all resolve one day in diamond time. Life like a gem to lift to the squint as through a jeweler’s loupe.

I thought every facet and flaw neither facet nor flaw in some final shine; chance and choice uncanny cognates; form, fate.

Now I am here. No diamond, no time, no omen but awe that a whirlwind could in not cohering cohere. Loss is my gift, bewilderment my bow.

[apparently “bow” here is the one that rhymes with “cow”]

“Via a parent or sister or nun or friend, a spouse or former spouse, names and addresses of the AIDS afflicted had a way of making their way to Dan. One visit tended to lead to another until death intervened. A typical first sentence: ‘I heard from so-and-so that you were ill and thought I would drop by to see how it’s going.’ He never identified himself as ‘Father Daniel,’ just Dan. ‘I wanted to make it as clear as possible that I was seeking no conversions or last-minute confessions,’ he told me. Dan often presided at funerals of people whom he had met only months or weeks before. He described himself as ‘a listener of last resort.’”

Jim Forest, At Play in the Lion’s Den: A Biography and Memoir of Daniel Berrigan.

Went to a recent school district committee meeting and: almost all council reps on laptops the whole time. Annual symposium at my university today: laptops during presentations. Was visiting consultant to big tech company to speak with staff about an r&d mandate that is open-ended, well-funded, ambitious and: laptops. Endless scrolling while presentations, hearings, talks are happening. I make an absolute rule in my classrooms or it would be the same. At this rate I could run for president if only because I actually sit and pay attention.

I need to write a long post about the many parents I know who come to me for advice about accepting an ADHD/related dx and the requisite IEP or 504 bureaucracy for their very average kids. It’s a well-meaning move from all parties to “do everything we can to help” by intervening. But the longitudinal data on labels is pretty damning and on medication is mixed at best. Again: good intentions from everyone. But parents need to be ruthlessly honest with themselves: Will intervening and saddling kids with labels really enhance the child’s school experience? Or will it salve a parent’s need to have a self-concept of Good Parent, one who Fights for the Child? Or will it solve a teacher’s (sometimes justified) need to have an optimized classroom? Those questions have very different protagonists. So much of parenting requires tolerating the inner uncertainty about how to attend closely to one’s individual children, including the attendance that is the most challenging and vital: watching, listening, and waiting.

Great to hear Matt Dinan further expound on his last couple of years in the classroom on Know Your Enemy (after publishing this post). Dinan’s experience echoes so much of my own, and it feels amazing to be starting 2026 with confidence and clarity about what I’m doing in the classroom, even if it’s rare in my institutional setting. And Dinan’s aside that he is hopelessly devoted to a triad of lost causes — cooperativism, the Catholic church, liberal education — made my heart swell.