My name is Stephen Bárczay Sloan.
I am a teacher, tutor, home schooler, and entrepreneur. View my CV.
What I love:
- Children - those curious little souls with a sparkle in their eyes and a bounce in their steps.
- Ideas - where they come from, how they emerge, spread, clash, and evolve.
- Books - as tiny sailing ships for ideas, wandering in the world until they arrive in our hands. Old books, new books, great books, fun books, classic story books, history books, reference books. Oh, how I love reference books! See what I’m reading now.
- Excellent Thinking and Writing – by great authors and by good students.
- Students Who Try – those willing students who want to succeed. Sometimes they fall down in trying. That’s when kind teaching makes all the difference.
- Adventure - collecting new experiences throughout life, such as backpacking at five, wandering the globe after college, tracing family history through Hungary and Slovakia, kayaking around Bainbridge Island.
- Sharing - the journey and my discoveries with others.
A few places I’ve been:
- At the helm of a sailboat from Seattle to Los Angeles.
- Reading Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” and shuddering at the power of the final paragraphs.
- Leading a company with 35 employees serving thousands of customers.
- Whisked by Yeat’s to the Lake Isle of Innisfree.
- In front of a history classroom full of 9th and 10th graders at West Sound Academy.
- Transported by A Time of Gifts to London in 1933 to join Patrick Leigh Fermor as he decides to walk to Constantinople.
- In a canoe on the Danube and on a sailboat on the Oslo fjord in reality, and Coasting
around England with Jonathan Raban in my imagination.
What I love most is to help build that magical connection between a reader’s own experiences and the author’s. I think Emerson captured it best in his essay, “History”, when he writes:
“In reading those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains, and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought.
The Greek had, it seems, the same fellow–beings as I. The sun and moon, water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. Then the vaunted distinction between Greek and English, between Classic and Romantic schools, seems superficial and pedantic.
When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to me, — when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do, as it were, run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why should I count Egyptian years?”
I delight in the timeless excitment of communing with great minds, courageous adventurers, and enlightened souls. Then, I love nothing more than sharing that delight with students.
The name:
In thinking about this work, I looked for the place where the learning magic happens. From mists in my mind, an image of the old oaken library table I ate at every day of my childhood merged with an image of a student sitting across my desk stacked with open books each shedding light on a shining facet of the idea in the air between us.
Only after I’d started down this path did I find out that many prestigious preparatory schools use a the Harkness Table method. Of course, these ideas of sharpening students by asking them discuss the big ideas and questions before them is a modern variant of the Socratic Method.
The company:
The Library Table dedicates itself to creating tools that develop active, skilled life-long learners. We support this work by selling books, courses, and tutoring services. Learn more about our classes here.
We’re deeply fulfilled by this work but always love support from you, our community of learners. Support can take many forms.
Send us your:
- Encouragement
- Ideas
- Suggested refinements
- Prayers
- Referrals to your Friends – see the Share links at the bottom of each page
Thank you for your interest and for your commitment to fine education in its many forms.
