Category: Spring 2016

Shakespeare (1564-1616) must have sensed these cultural changes deeply enough to predict and highlight the perils of individualism in some of his plays, namely Romeo and Juliet. In his time, and especially in the seventeenth century, the notion of the individual changed significantly in its relation to the church, the monarchy, society, personal freedom, the literary life, public and private life, and even …

Families come to trust Memoria Press for a variety of reasons. We came through desperation. Our oldest child did not speak until he was five, and he and his younger sister have significant receptive and expressive language difficulties. Finding a good, solid education for them was literally bringing us to our knees. We knew we wanted to homeschool. But having …

How can I help my struggling student with his online classes? 1. Begin with only one course. We strongly recommend starting the student with only one course, unless he is accustomed to completing large amounts of advanced classwork.  2. Plan to complete each assignment. A structured online class may require a great deal of time for the struggling student, so …

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), …

  Rhetoric. To most modern minds, the word smacks of cunning—the empty polemic or self-aggrandizement of a political figure, or perhaps the crafty prose of a present-day sophist selling overpriced or unnecessary products to the unlearned. To those who have delved a bit into classical education, rhetoric is the third liberal art, the top of the trivium, the noble art of persuasion, a …

    In today’s materialistic society, the thing we all seem to want more of is immaterial: time. Homeschool parents struggle to teach multiple children in different grades. Classroom teachers have up to 25 or 30 students in a single grade (15 as a maximum if they are lucky), and their time in the classroom is diminished with music classes, art …

    When I was in junior high school, my father began adding on to our house. For the foundation he dug a lot of trenches in the ground, built wood forms to pour the cement in, and hired a cement truck to fill them up. I remember thinking that it seemed like a lot of trouble to take for …

My father was an aerospace engineer. When I was growing up, I never really knew what he did, since his job involved mostly top-secret projects. In fact, I never once visited his office, which required a high-security clearance even to enter. But over the years, I did manage to piece together a few facts about what he did. One day, when …