From a Daniel Akst article in the Wall Street Journal, 29 August 2008:

What is this miracle that lies within the reach of nearly every family? It’s simple. All you have to do is to start insisting that your children fully apply themselves to their studies — and commit yourself to doing your part. That means making sure they do all the work expected of them as well as their abilities allow. It also means making sure everything at home stands behind these principles and supports the idea of learning.

Read the entire article here.

TAA fifth grader David Null’s Downingtown East Middle School hockey team won the championship for the middle school league.  They won 4 to 2 against Avon Grove for the championship game on March 12.  It was a tie game 2-2 and David scored a goal to make it 3 to 2.  He scored the goal late in the third period so the Downingtown team was able to keep Avon Grove from scoring again.  Avon Grove even pulled their goalie to see if they could score with another player on the ice, only to have Downingtown score on their empty net.  Congratulations, David!

On Thursday March 13, our older students were privileged to attend Dr. Walter McDougall’s spellbinding lecture at the Foreign Policy Research Institute at the Union League on his new book, Throes of Democracy: America in the Civil War Era, 1829–1877 (HarperCollins), sequel to McDougall’s Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History, 1585–1828.  Walter A. McDougall is Co-chair of FPRI’s History Institute for Teachers and Co-chair of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West. He is also the Allyn-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Chicago in 1974 and is a veteran of the Vietnam War.

Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Norfolk, VA has recorded the entire Shorter Catechism on MP3 files. This resource may be downloaded for free, used on the PC, copied to MP3 players, or converted to cd audio files and burned to cd. This could be a very handy way for students to review their catechism questions! Go to http://ipcnorfolk.org/resources.shtml and scroll to the bottom of the page to find the MP3 files (HT to Mr. Barry Hofstetter of the TAA faculty).

This New York Times editorial, entitled “A Vote for Latin” by Harry Mount, promotes the study of classics, particularly Latin. Mr. Mount is the author of Carpe Diem: Put a Little Latin in Your Life by Hyperion Books. His editorial begins:

At first glance, it doesn’t seem tragic that our leaders don’t study Latin anymore. But it is no coincidence that the professionalization of politics — which encourages budding politicians to think of education as mere career preparation — has occurred during an age of weak rhetoric, shifting moral values, clumsy grammar and a terror of historical references and eternal values that the Romans could teach us a thing or two about.