Some children struggle with math. Proposed solutions abound, such as limiting struggling students’ math adventures to cooking, measuring, calculating money, and other “real-life” pursuits. But if we assume such a pragmatic approach, what do our children miss? Is there more to math than “useful” application? In a classical education we view arithmetic and mathematics as […]
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 […]
My daughter and I recently went out on a date. After missing the movie we wanted to see, we ended up watching The Book of Eli, a movie I had not heard anything about. The movie opens in the future, after some sort of apocalypse. There is little vegetation, water is scarce, the roads are littered with abandoned cars, […]
One of the things that makes me smile in life is standing in front of novice Latin students and listening as they recite declension endings, their Ss slurring because of missing teeth, their eyes straining upward, and heads nodding as they grasp for the mental picture they have of those ten little endings. I also […]