Blog
Can Two Negatives Really Create Something Positive?
Is watching your child struggle in math really such a bad thing? A positive times a positive is positive, a positive times a negative is negative, a negative times a negative is positive. What?? Ughh? Sigh? Head drops to table. To connect this to a personal real-life...
The Importance of Proofreading: Easy Tips for Building a Lasting Habit
Written language allows us to communicate with each other and document our thoughts and understandings for future generations, which is important in industry, academia, and personal life. While people may often associate writing with the creative sphere, writing is a...
Why Mastering Strong Paragraph Writing Is Crucial For Essay Writing
Why is it important to understand, apply, and master strong paragraph writing before moving on to essay writing? Practically anyone can put together a paragraph of 5 sentences. But is it constructed properly? Do your sentences flow to form a well thought out paragraph...
Windows and Doors: Discover the Value of Learning a Foreign Language
Learning a second language can open unexpected doors in a person’s life. As is often the case for many school subjects, students ask why it is worth their time and effort to study the material. There are subjects that have obvious and immediate applications in the...
You Don’t Have to Agree with Your Teacher (And Other Secrets for Analyzing Literature)
The first secret of literary analysis is that you don’t have to agree with your teacher. Yep, I said it. While some people try to fit literature into tidy boxes, genres, and purposes, my favorite high school English teachers and college professors encouraged...
How Can Studying Psychology Help Me TODAY?
Why study psychology? I get asked this question a lot. After 20 years of creatively trying to inspire the asker of the question to see how amazing and far-reaching experience in the field of psychology can be, I have some pretty nifty answers. Do you ever have contact...
Need A COVID-Friendly Fun Family Activity?
Are you and your children tired of being stuck inside because of COVID? Is everyone tired of the same old thing? Well, here’s something fun you can do to get everyone excited about getting outdoors again. Go geocaching! What’s Geocaching, you ask? Geocaching is a fun...
The Power of Poetry to Improve Writing
“Poetry is a window, a way to see inside” (H. Wallace 1). When we study poetry, we discern our inner world and speak into the outer world words that shape history. We follow in the footsteps of master poets who teach us how to play with words to evoke deep emotion,...
The Book vs. the Movie: More Than Meets the Eye
Which is better: Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling or Haydn’s oratorio The Creation? While you might prefer one over the other, it’s unfair to declare one as “better” because they are completely different art forms. How many times have...
Does This Sentence Even Go Here? A Language Teacher’s Guide to Polishing Paragraphs and Essays
As a teacher of both English and French over the years, I have often been reading a student’s writing and suddenly asked myself, “Does this sentence even go here?” And quite often, upon further inspection, the answer has been “no.” The truth is, this is a question...
Anti-Climactic Abeka: Why Reading Acclaimed Literature is Superior to Curriculum-Based Readers
It was my first year teaching at a private Christian school in the DC suburbs. I was excited, optimistic, naïve, and had no idea what I was doing. Like many teachers, I had no choice in the materials I used, and I was quickly disappointed as I looked over the...
Are You Stressed? Five Tips to De-Stress Right Now
Let’s face it; times are tough right now. Just about everything in our world feels turned upside down thanks to COVID. Many of us have lost our regular sources of social support as we find our in-person co-ops or other classes, sports teams, prayer groups, mom’s...
