been accused of corrupting the youth of my city by teaching them to ask questions. In Teaching as a Subversive Activity, educator Neil Postman (1969) pointed out the root of education, educe, means a drawing out of one’s potential. By asking open ended question and challenging ideas, I attempt to draw out the potential in my students, my children, and myself. The best questions generate more questions.
As a teacher of rhetoric, I owe homage to Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian for making logic, rhetoric, and grammar part of the trivium of the liberal arts. Aristotle posited the classical arrangement of argument—introduction, narration, confirmation, refutation and concession, and summation. These are skills I taught just today Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric—inventio, dispositio, eluctio, memoria, and actio—are still taught in rhetoric courses today as invention, arrangement, memory, and delivery (or style). …show more content…
As a child I heard Thoreau’s words from Walden, or A Life in the Woods (1854): “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or faraway” (p. 242). Not only was it my first exposure to Thoreau and transcendentalism, but it was the first time I remember lines from an author that seemed to capture my spirit. I am an idealist who believes that people are essentially good. I have tried to create love and peace throughout my life. These ideas go hand-in-hand with my core spiritual beliefs—the Quaker SPICES- simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and stewardship and “the fruit of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness” (Gal. 5:22). I believe “to love another person is to see the face of God” (Boubil, 1980). I find peace, beauty, simplicity in nature, just as Thoreau, did, using Wendell Berry’s “Peace of Wild Things” as my comfort
As a teacher of rhetoric, I owe homage to Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian for making logic, rhetoric, and grammar part of the trivium of the liberal arts. Aristotle posited the classical arrangement of argument—introduction, narration, confirmation, refutation and concession, and summation. These are skills I taught just today Cicero’s five canons of rhetoric—inventio, dispositio, eluctio, memoria, and actio—are still taught in rhetoric courses today as invention, arrangement, memory, and delivery (or style). …show more content…
As a child I heard Thoreau’s words from Walden, or A Life in the Woods (1854): “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or faraway” (p. 242). Not only was it my first exposure to Thoreau and transcendentalism, but it was the first time I remember lines from an author that seemed to capture my spirit. I am an idealist who believes that people are essentially good. I have tried to create love and peace throughout my life. These ideas go hand-in-hand with my core spiritual beliefs—the Quaker SPICES- simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and stewardship and “the fruit of the Spirit”: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness” (Gal. 5:22). I believe “to love another person is to see the face of God” (Boubil, 1980). I find peace, beauty, simplicity in nature, just as Thoreau, did, using Wendell Berry’s “Peace of Wild Things” as my comfort