by Phil Houseal | May 1, 2024 | All Articles, Education, History, Philosophy
May 1, 2024–I’m nearsighted and thankful for it. Not being farseeing has completely influenced my life, in sometimes unexpected ways. For those of you that can see a mole on a gnat’s nose on a barn door 100 yards away, here’s what being nearsighted is like: you can’t...
by Phil Houseal | Apr 24, 2024 | All Articles, Education, Events, Music, People of the Hill Country, Philosophy
April 24, 2024–‘Tis the season for that unsettling rite of spring that comes to all multi-generational households: the music recital. To this day, I remember my first piano recital at age 8. It was in the Methodist church basement in my small hometown. I squirmed in...
by Phil Houseal | Apr 17, 2024 | All Articles, Education, Philosophy
April 17, 2024–Did you know they changed Bloom’s Taxonomy? Anyone who studied education in the past 50 years is intimately familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy. K-12 teacher education students had this pyramid drilled into them. To summarize a college semester into one...
by Phil Houseal | Apr 10, 2024 | All Articles, Education, Food, Philosophy
April 10, 2024–One of our kids’ favorite family activities was responding to The Kids’ Book of Questions, by Gregory Stock. It was a collection of 260 open-ended questions with answers you could not find in any book. Rather, they posed moral dilemmas, what-ifs, and...
by Phil Houseal | Apr 3, 2024 | All Articles, Education, History, Philosophy
April 3, 2024–Edges and spaces are where the important things hide. I first noticed the significance of edges as a boy growing up on a farm. The Midwest topography is a quilt of corn fields and beans. When you stand in the middle of a sea of soybeans and turn a...
by Phil Houseal | Mar 27, 2024 | All Articles, Education, Food, History, Philosophy
March 27, 2024–For some reason, grits was the topic of a recent online discussion. The food brought up clearly delineated preferences, “delineated” as in above or below the Mason-Dixon line. Southerners love grits; northerners don’t. This started a long discussion of...
by Phil Houseal | Mar 20, 2024 | All Articles, History, Philosophy
Mar 20, 2024–Man’s fascination with light arcs back to that time he first rubbed two sticks together and created fire. First, this had to be one amazing guy. Who was that caveman, hulking about in a tiger-skin toga, who looked at a fallen dead limb and thought, I...
by Phil Houseal | Mar 13, 2024 | All Articles, Philosophy
March 13, 2024–I sometimes think about Vicki. Vicki was a high school classmate I grew up with back in our small hometown. We both came from large Catholic families, started Kindergarten together, attended catechism and received first communion together, shared...
by Phil Houseal | Mar 6, 2024 | All Articles, Education
March 6, 2024–Judging by comments on community news sites–or by riding with anyone–everyone believes they are the only ones that know how to drive. I was reminded last week that I don’t follow all traffic laws, for the simple reason that I don’t understand all the...
by Phil Houseal | Feb 29, 2024 | All Articles, Education, Food, History, Philosophy
Feb 28, 2024–As a kid I remember first seeing the Jeopardy category “Potpourri.” I was not familiar with the word, but after watching I soon learned it meant “place to use up leftover material that all together wasn’t enough to make up an entire category with one...
