O imitatores, servum pecus![1] 
​O ye imitators, servile herd!

Imitation is normal. It’s how we learn—to speak, to write, to behave. It’s a beginning. But thievery is a different matter. And in the first century, theft was deeply personal to Quintus Horatius Flaccus.

The son of a slave, Horace was likely of mixed heritage, but he was privileged to be educated in Rome rather than in his native village with the sons of centurions. His father worked as an auction agent and owned his own farm, a rare feat for a former slave in the first century.

His education complete, Horace made the grand tour of his time with other wealthy young men by traveling to Athens. While visiting the Forum, however, his story quickly changed. Caesar’s assassin Brutus was passionately pleading with the crowd to join him in his battle for the empire. At age 20, Horace was enamored by those words, and with no military training, he joined in the first major battle at Philippi where Brutus’s forces were quickly overthrown. Horace was captured but not executed.

When he finally returned to Rome, he found that his father had died. What’s worse is that the family home, possessions, and land had all been given to an honorable war veteran, not a traitor like Horace. Penniless, Horace was angry but alive. He found a menial job in the treasury but remained furious at his own choices and at the loss of all his father had worked for. Thus began an almost vindictive hobby of writing critical verse. His early poetry was entertaining, and friends shared his negative verse with Maecenas, a nobleman and trusted advisor to the emperor Augustus.[2]
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Horace was lucky. Within a year, Maecenas became Horace’s patron, offering him wealth and a rural estate outside of Rome. Thriving as a writer of both critical and noble verse, Horace had arrived. He quickly won the Emperor’s attention, yet Horace was never constrained by a desire to please those in power. A handful of odes and sermones (pithy moral lessons) make that clear. And with his popularity and position came the imitators and thieves. . .

They have multiplied across my nightstand, and the stack is growing. Sticky notes, a pencil, junkmail postcards, and a receipt work as placeholders.

I actively read three to four books. I read a few pages from each book every night or switch from book to book. I have plenty of other reading friends who keep disciplined systems like these, sometimes with up to ten books.

Unfortunately, I started four books in December and have not returned to them since. Can I blame my attention in a distracted age? Certainly. Did I spend a lot of late night hours visiting instead of reading? You bet, but a few months have now passed. Is a book or two ready for the fatal Did-Not-Finish pile? Also a possibility. But I wonder if it’s something else that leads me to lay aside certain books.

Here are two examples. For a decade, I have wanted to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel, from 1920, This Side of Paradise. I’ve taught many of Fitzgerald’s short stories and The Great Gatsby countless times. I might never find a character to truly cheer for in his work, but that is my opinion of course and also not the point of fiction. My margin notes and lines and boxes of every color reveal how I’ve learned and reflected on Fitzgerald’s works over the years as I taught them. I relish so much of his style and phrasing while I can also appreciate his critical eye of American society. Yet I stopped halfway through his instant bestseller. I don’t like Amory. I have left him at age twenty in the middle of Princeton in chapter 3, and I’m not sure I care enough to read more. I feel a certain stubbornness or maybe ambivalence. . . 

Whenever I’ve taught research methods to middle school and high school students, I’ve often claimed a magic resource exists for the object of their research. Sometimes, just sometimes, a scholar, author, or historian is so fluent in their topic that they clearly credit numerous others in a single text. And that book is magic in its ability to point to ideas, connections, subtopics, and other books and journals. I attempt to inspire my students to read bibliographies and endnotes with that in mind, to think of it like an investigation. Some do find a magic resource, but only a few experience the thrill of the hunt and the sigh of relief that help has been found.

Sometimes you find that magic book in a bibliography; sometimes it’s hiding in an old-school footnote, “See Charles Augustus Milverton for further thoughts on acquiring the personal correspondence of others (Blackmailing for Everyone, 1880).” I look it up, and there it is. Milverton has already done a chunk of research and written on the very thing I need! I order the book immediately. If only it were always this easy.
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I found this to be true years ago in my own research stacks when I was reading lots of Willa Cather’s short and long fiction. The fiction I could find easily, but I also had to know what other scholars had already said. I wouldn’t want my research interest (or thesis!) to duplicate another’s. In my early Cather research, I was borrowing books from within the local library system and through interlibrary loans. Some books were helpful. Many were not. It’s the age-old riddle of research work, much like perusing a flea market looking for a valuable antique. I had to determine what was valuable to me. That Cather culling helped me know what to invest in and literally purchase for my own library. . .

As I began a new administrative job a few years ago, I was introduced to a new form of teaching evaluation–at least, new to me. It was a three page long self-evaluation form. It might be startling to some, but in twenty plus years as an educator, both public and private, I had not been part of a system that had used written reflection as part of an annual performance evaluation. I was eager to try it.

After observing in classrooms as an administrator, I filled out a form for each teacher while my teachers filled out their own. It felt hospitable. “You evaluate yourself, and I will too.” We met and exchanged papers, reading through comments and discussing them page by page. We were all new to the practice.

Some teachers left their comment sections blank while others left copious notes. Those who filled in every comment box were often harsh on themselves while those who left entire pages blank didn’t see a need for it, revealing much by omission. Both choices allowed for good discussions, but I quickly realized that two forms versus one still left a gap. The two-part system was fair and decent, but I wondered how much we could gauge, or better yet, how much we should.

Measures require standards, and we need concrete measures in our employee records. My husband has filled out dozens of these forms for decades in the IT world. In business, a good employee is a productive one. Standardized years ago, words like integrity, accountability, timeliness, leadership, dedication, populate any annual performance review. The key is in the title since entire sections ask how well you maintained the company vision. Did you increase scale and scope? Did you step up to challenges? Did you architect projects? Did you streamline support? Did you handle requirements? Were you, in fact, productive for the mighty corporation?

However, an annual performance review or regular feedback can only measure a handful of character traits and job skills, never the whole person. I’m convinced no evaluation truly can, nor should it, if we look at work alone. I must manage my teachers in one sense, but how do I measure part of a person if my chief goal is success? Is success my chief goal?
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It might sound strange, but I am not looking for a new evaluation form for myself or my teachers. I don’t need another checklist with skills, observations, behaviors, virtues or vices. How should I really assess a person? Or more importantly, how do I think about measuring myself and others? As Dorothy Sayers said in her 1942 essay “Why Work?”, we might need a “thoroughgoing revolution in our whole attitude toward work."

In first grade, I had the misfortune of being the first left-handed student Mrs. Posey had ever taught. I sat in the front row by her desk “because you’re different,” she huffed. My five-year-old mind thought she was an ancient grump. She grumbled when she “had to” give me a pair of left-handed scissors. She grumbled when she corrected my pencil position. I felt her glare at the slant of my letters.

I was plain scared of her, and I’m pretty sure others were too. Whether Mrs. Posey knew it or not, her classroom had a culture. Every first grade classroom does. Every type of classroom, in fact, has structure, routine, and expectations, intentional or not. And the teacher is the core of that culture.
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Mandi Gerth’s Thoroughness and Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom addresses this very issue. Classroom culture may develop accidentally, but the truth is that a neutral classroom does not exist. Although her apologia is intended for classical Christian educators, Gerth speaks to all teachers: “To be great teachers, we must do so consciously and intentionally, for we cannot avoid crafting culture, and we must be careful of the message we send." . . .

“If the condition of man is to be progressively ameliorated, as we fondly hope and believe, education is to be the chief instrument in effecting it.” —Thomas Jefferson to M.A. Jullien, 1818

For better or worse, education can shape who we are, and Thomas Jefferson knew that. In the midst of the American Revolution, he determined that the Commonwealth of Virginia should have a system of education, one that offered learning opportunities to more children.

My high school students were positive, however, that Jefferson believed in education for everyone. After studying William Hogelund’s Declaration: The Nine Tumultuous Weeks When America Became Independent, May 1-July 4, 1776, they saw Jefferson as a type of unsung hero for his hand in drafting the Declaration at such a young age. They also saw fit to laud him as the first American for equal rights in education. Surely they had heard that somewhere.
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It sounded like a generalization to me, but my recollection was rusty. Had Jefferson fought for such rights? In Virginia, he had served for years in the House of Delegates and as governor for a time before becoming President. What had Thomas Jefferson said in all of his many letters? Did his view change over time? . . .

Wendell Berry’s 1964 poem “The Wild” captures the poignant beauty of nature breaking through a world increasingly indifferent to its presence. Offering a stark contrast between a wasted city lot and the colorful flight of warblers and tanagers, Berry calls his reader to embrace the necessary beauty of the wild, receiving as a gift to modern man “its remembrance of what is.” We have never been more in need of such a gift.

Current research reveals startling statistics suggesting disconnection, depression, and a loss of exposure to and experience of the natural world—a series of terms not unrelated. Social media touts community at the expense of in-person relationships. Technological progress spins at a frenetic pace. And a main component of human life we know to combat these ills is strikingly absent for many. Children—and perhaps their parents—have traded the forest for screen time, nature writing for animé, the classics for the latest dystopian sci-fi binge. As a result, we’ve lost even the language to name and notice the natural world.

Losing More Than Language
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British author and scholar Robert Macfarlane sounded the alarm on this phenomenon in his 2017 article in The Guardian entitled “Badger or Bulbasaur—have children lost touch with nature?” In his insightful book, Landmarks, Macfarlane notes the loss of nature literacy among children and contemporary society’s seeming indifference, as evidenced by the Oxford Junior Dictionary’s “culling of words concerning nature.” He suggests that “the substitutions made in the dictionary—the natural being displaced by the indoor and virtual—are a small but significant symptom of the simulated life we increasingly live.” In other words, the loss of language is indicative of a loss of experience. Indeed, he is not the first to note the significant connection between language and reality. . . .

I don’t want to be a hostile reader, nor do I want that for my students. My aim is to be a charitable one, one who acknowledges that reading has the potential to form me and my students not only for the better but for the eternal. I know, however, that it is easier to aspire to this attitude than to consistently embody it.

Deep Reading: Practices To Subvert the Vice of Our Distracted, Hostile, and Consumeristic Age (2024) shares this view by encouraging us as readers, thinkers, and teachers to develop “practices that help us tend to what we read, the way we want to attend to our friends and neighbors.” Rather than viewing reading primarily as a means of getting students to arrive at the right beliefs or worldviews, authors Rachel Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel De Smith Roberts challenge us to view reading as a hospitable activity that might counter the age of distraction.
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Where has our ‘sustained, unbroken attention’ gone? In Part I, titled “Practices to Subvert Distraction,” training our attention becomes a way of fostering self-control, of “temper[ing] our desires for what is pleasurable with our need to focus on what is good.” Ideal for new teachers, these first two chapters address attentiveness while reviewing common sense methods for encouraging it in classrooms and other reading communities. They describe the practices of discussion, annotation, and close reading exercises in effective classrooms. While they discuss ideas such as lectio divina, field trips, or reading aloud, the most helpful ideas for my humanities classes come from their reading reflection questions that ask us to consciously think through what our real reading process looks like. . . .

No other author has so immediately affected my perspective on work as Josef Pieper. In my mind, work was separate from the rest of life. Working hours have always been a discrete part of my day since I took my first job as a teenager. Maybe this division is inherent to American culture and how I grew up, but in Pieper’s mind, work is part of our response to the gift of life.

Though published decades ago, German philosopher Josef Pieper’s commentaries on work, leisure, and festivity bring to light two deficits within our culture today—true community relationship and conscious introspection. His works, Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1948) and In Tune with the World: A Theory of Festivity (1965), posit not a solution to our culture’s dis-perspective, but a call to return to a meaningful and fruitful life. If we can’t recognize leisure, then our culture is endangered.
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But leisure is a tricky word in the twenty-first century. Is it welcoming visitors at our leisure? Is it reclining on a couch in a leisure suit? Is it being free from work demands? Is it the opposite of work? What kind of leisure is this? . . .