Category: Winter 2013

Parents of struggling students ask common questions such as these: “Should I bring home my special-needs son and teach him alongside my other children? How would I modify the materials? How would I arrange for his therapies? Can my special-needs child study Latin? I already feel like giving up!” Bringing your special-needs or struggling student …

Our educational establishment is very good at making promises, but not very good at keeping them. Every couple of years, a new initiative is launched to give us hope that things will get better. The initiative is launched amidst great fanfare, agreements are signed, money is exchanged, meetings are held, acronyms are assigned, and for a …

Reason #7: Religion Saint Augustine in his Confessions tells us that after many years of wandering in the desert of indecision, it was Cicero who led him to Christ. Cicero’s Hortensius set him on the path to Christian conversion by implanting in him a longing for the immortality of wisdom. The text of Hortensius did …

Sometimes our study of literature resembles a kind of clinical laboratory lesson. We encircle the text in our white coats, ready to dissect the story like a dead animal. Or, if this sounds too invasive or scientific, then we analyze the text in order to extract the “Elements of Literature” (the title of a recent big-press …

In the world of education, there are many temptations that would lure us to our destruction, and none greater than the siren song of education technology. The computer is, of course, only one form of education technology, and education technology is anything but new. Those of us educated in the 60s and 70s will remember …

With one exception I have never heard anyone speak seriously and comprehensively about the disadvantages of computer technology, which strikes me as odd. After all, anyone who has studied the history of technology knows that technological change is always a Faustian bargain: Technology giveth and technology taketh away, and not always in equal measure. A …

  The centuries-old and nearly universally accepted method of teaching Latin is known as the “grammar/translation” method. But for well over a hundred years there has existed, mainly in England and the United States, a small but devoted segment of the Latin-teaching community that has advocated a very different method of Latin instruction. This group …