I went to my hotel after a long day at a homeschool convention. It was late, and I was hungry. So, after checking in, I decided to walk to a Subway I had seen to get a sandwich. By the time I walked out of the hotel lobby, clouds had moved in, and the rain […]
What has the Greek quest for excellence and order and beauty to do with the Hebrew quest for the living God? This is the question the Church Fathers asked themselves, a query that we still must raise from time to time. And in our day in particular, it is the question that Christian educators in […]
This is the third and final in a series of articles describing Memoria Press’ history scope and sequence. My initial purpose for these articles was to give the reasoning behind our classical studies choices, and in particular to explain the sequence shown on our curriculum map on pages 20-21: 3rd grade Greek myths, 4th Rome, […]
Part I: Dorothy Sayers speaks about her experience learning Latin I was born at Oxford, in the fourth year before Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. My father was at that time Headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School, where it was part of his duty to instruct small demons with angel-voices in the elements of the […]
By Evan Wilson When it comes to history, rhetoric comes before grammar… What has the teaching of history become in private Christian establishments? Here is a section out of a commonly used Christian school textbook, slightly rewritten to protect the innocent (namely myself), but preserving the idea of the original: During the Second Punic War […]
Have you ever read Good-bye Mr. Chips or Anne of Green Gables? If so, you may have noticed that the students seemed to spend a lot of time studying Latin grammar and that this study was completed before high school. In fact, this is where the name “grammar school” came from: from the days when the most important […]
If I see my logic program listed in the math section of catalogs one more time, I’m going to pull out my hair! Not that they’re trying to make me mad or anything. In fact, they’re just trying to sell my book, and they probably think that ought to make me happy, and they’re right. […]
For most classical educators, teaching history chronologically means covering the eras of history in three cycles, each cycle in increasing depth, and each cycle corresponding to one stage of the trivium. Here is a typical sequence of historical eras covered chronologically within each four year cycle: Old Testament and Egypt Greece and Rome Middle Ages, […]
We have a tendency to put academic subjects into separate and unrelated categories which have little to do with each other. We have our curriculum chart where we put things such asReading, English, Math, Science, each one dealing with a different skill and a different body of knowledge. Logic seldom finds a place in our lists, although it may be […]
As homeschoolers, we rely too much on experts; this is true not just for homeschoolers, but for the American culture at large. We rely on experts to teach us what to do, how to do it, and sometimes even how to think. In many cases, there is a good reason to rely on expert advice. […]