Good Books for Great Readers
You know about The Great Books and even the best books, but what about plain old good books? These books are the meat and potatoes of a child’s reading life especially those children who read constantly. My son James read The Hobbit in one day. I don’t recommend that but it happens. My oldest son, [...]
The Energy of Comparison: How a Coleridge Poem Connects Us to the Nexus
“A delight//Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad//As I myself were there!” These lines, appropriately placed in the middle of Coleridge’s poem “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” reveal the beauty and excitement of delight experienced vicariously through nature and others. The speaker, Coleridge himself, experiences a powerful inner joy through imagining himself on [...]
Six Days of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio
This guest post was written by Dr. Carol Reynolds, author of Discovering Music. ~ Everybody knows the “Twelve Days of Christmas,” but what about the six days of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio? It’s an astonishing work, but encountered far less often than Handel’s nearly contemporary Messiah. And when we hear it, it’s likely in a concert [...]
Why I Am A Humanities Teacher
Origins I didn’t mean to become a humanities teacher. I blame the stories. Having fallen in love with classical languages in college, I seized the opportunity to teach Latin at a classical school. My only obstacle was that I didn’t actually know Latin. I knew Greek, had even taught it, but Latin was a [...]
Why Language Sets Us Free
Recently, I was sitting in on a teacher training session at a Christian inner-city high school in which an “expert” on SIOP Lesson Plans had been brought in to teach the faculty how to create effective lesson plans. I don’t know what SIOP stands for, but it was something that the Michigan Department of Education [...]
The Importance of Voluntary Organisation
In 1917, a young Harvard graduate and poet named John Reed was in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, he had played a role in making it happen. In 1919 he wrote a book about it called Ten Days That Shook the World. Someone has pasted inside the front cover of my copy a [...]
Teaching Shakespeare To Children
This guest post was written by Cindy Rollins. — What do you think of when you hear the name Shakespeare? A surprising number of people have fiercely negative reactions, perhaps thinking of their bohemian English teacher sweeping across the room quoting the tragic Ophelia, “”There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.” What possible benefit could a modern [...]
Waiting For Superman: A Review for Christian Educators
This guest post is by Dr. Christopher A Perrin, founder of Classical Academic Press and director of The Classical School Roundtable * * * * It is hard to watch Davis Guggenheim’s documentary Waiting for Superman without leaning into the screen with anticipation and hope, only to droop with disappointment, yes even despair. It is [...]
What is Woman?: A Re-examination of Feminism & the Church
The relationship between Feminism and the church – and the current debate surrounding Feminism – cannot be understood without first closely examining the historical roots of Feminism. As with any idea, we must first figure out how we got where we are before we can determine how to proceed. We cannot understand anything about [...]
On Wrecking Books To Bring Them To Life
This guest post is by Renee Mathis, a CiRCE Certified Master Teacher and expert in The Lost Tools of Writing. ~ Teachers love their books. Homeschooling moms love their books. English majors, pastors, and writers all love their books. Who among us hasn’t at one time secretly believed that “the one who dies with the [...]
