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CONTINUING IN THE WORD
Perspectives on Homeschooling and Classical Christian Education from Scholars Online
Latest Posts
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Failure is not an option
When I taught my first class as a graduate assistant at UCLA, one of the students asked whether my Western Civilization section was a “Mickey Mouse” course. What he meant was, “Is this a course with a guaranteed A if…
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Learning and teaching…and learning
When we first started homeschooling our kids, Christe and I generally divided our tasks according to our general areas of relative expertise — she took the more scientific and mathematical subjects, while I dealt with the more humanities-oriented ones, especially…
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Autonomy of Means revisited: the Internet
Last May I wrote a piece for this blog entitled “Autonomy of Means and Education”. The choice of phrasing was drawn from Charles WIlliams, “Bors to Elayne, on the King’s Coins”. I’ve recently had reason to revisit the question again,…
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Not the Blog Entry I Had Planned
The phrase “Continuing in the Word” has taken on a new aspect in the last two weeks. As many of you already know, our writing instructor, Jill Byington, lost her battle with breast cancer on December 8, 2010. Her students…
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Autonomy of means and education
Though not as well known as his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams (1886–1945) was nevertheless an active member of the Inklings throughout most of its lifetime, and displayed a powerful, if somewhat eccentric, spiritual insight. He wrote…
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The True Test of Education
Sometime around 1969, standing in the breezeway of Balch Hall at Scripps College in Claremont, I typed “Echo Hello World” on the keyboard of the metal Texas Instruments paper terminal, saved the string as a text file named (with masterful…
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Latin pronunciation for the continuing student
On bulletin boards and in magazines dealing with classical homeschooling, one question that arises over and over again is, “What sort of pronunciation should we use in teaching Latin?” The options usually boil down to two: the reconstructed classical pronunciation,…
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The King of Quotations
This summer I’m planning on teaching the second of my three Summer Shakespeare courses. Accordingly, I’ve been putting together a web site for it, and have been thinking about Shakespeare a good deal in general; in addition, our son recently…
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Making Sense and Finding Meaning
My intermediate and advanced Greek and Latin classes are largely translation-based. There’s a lot of discussion among Latin teachers about whether that’s a good approach, but much of the dispute is, I think, mired in terminological ambiguity, and at least…
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The Right Answer
I start Natural Science I each year with the question “What is science?” The result is generally a lively debate in which students start by giving me one-sentence answers. “Science is the study of nature”, Joe says. “What do you…
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Why study Latin?
I read a lot of material on classical education, and I’ve become a little bit skeptical of much of it. In almost any given context, one question that’s sure to come up is, “Why study Latin?” Almost everyone who writes…
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The Forest in the Garden
Literature often gives us pairs of similar images with sharply contrasting implications or referents. In the symbolic vocabulary of an earlier age, the garden, with all its Edenic connotations, was a symbol of safety, confinement, order, and harmony. The language…