Category Archives: Grammar

How to Argue

How To Argue

When I worked in public policy many years ago, one of my jobs was to take long policy papers from think tanks and reduce them down to one or two pages for state lawmakers. I also wrote the scripts for a popular radio show called “Point/Counterpoint” on a very large network in which two people […]

Through A Glass Wine-Darkly

Through a Glass Wine-Darkly

Have you heard the one about the color blue? The story goes that the Greeks had no word for the color. In Homer, things traditionally thought of as blue—the sea, the sky—go by gloomy words like “brazen” or “wine-dark.” Trivial as it may seem, this is the fact that launched a thousand speculative ships towards […]

Archaic On Purpose: A Defense Of The King James Bible

Archaic on Purpose

It is an interesting irony that, at a time when so many Christians have abandoned the King James Bible, a prominent atheist should come forth to praise it. In celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible in 2011, the famed unbeliever Christopher Hitchens paid it gushing homage in Vanity Fair magazine, […]

How Grammar Can Save Your Life

I’m not a Latin teacher; I’m a doctor. I didn’t learn Latin growing up, other than maybe the conjugation of amo, but I’m learning it now as I teach my children. I have heard many times about the benefits of Latin—not only how it helps to build vocabulary knowledge, but how it helps you to […]

How to Teach Phonics (And How Not To)

In the Summer 2014 Classical Teacher, I wrote an extensive article exploring the question, “What is the Classical Approach to Phonics?” The contention of that article was that there are two basic approaches to phonics in the classical education world: the traditional method and the Spalding method. The Spalding method is based on the book The Writing Road to Reading (WRTR), […]

How to Conduct a Recitation and Why

Why Recite?  Forget matching, multiple choice, or fill-in the blanks. If you want a child to really know–truly own–a body of information, Recitation is the only way to go. Previously the sole method of testing, Recitation requires mastery of a subject like no other testing mechanism can. With nowhere to hide and no opportunity for […]

The War Against Grammar

war

I have taught classics at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee since 1973. During these years, I have noticed a decline in the verbal skills of my students. It is embodied in the difficulties that they have in reading comprehension and English composition, as well as in the fact that few are capable of studying a foreign language successfully. […]

The Shadow of God

shadow

    The REAL Reason Our Educational Elites Don’t Like Grammar In Leo Tolstoy’s great Christian novel Anna Karenina, an after-dinner conversation turns to the subject of which European nation is more civilized—the English, the French, or the German. Karnenin, Anna’s husband, asserts that that civilization is most influential which is the most “truly educated.” […]

English Grammar for the Grammar Stage

English

Q:  Why doesn’t English grammar stick? A:  Because we don’t follow the natural order: memorization in the grammar stage and analysis in the logic stage. The name grammar school comes from the early Renaissance, when the major subject of the elementary years was the Latin grammar. The young grammar student memorized Latin grammar forms—declensions and conjugations—and gradually […]

The Grammar of Logic

logic

Why a Knowledge of Grammar Is Indispensable for an Understanding of Logic I meet a lot of homeschool mothers at conventions all over the country and one of the most common questions I get is this: “What do you do for a critical thinking skills program before we do your logic program in the seventh grade?” […]