Classical Writing

I ran across this article recently, and just felt that every homeschooler should read this, especially those who teach Latin.

http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/LatinBackground/SilentReading.html

It is written by a Latin professor, and he is discussing how the ancients always read everything aloud, where we moderns always read everything silently, to ourselves.

Read his wise words for yourselves (or aloud to your whole family).

Our family’s homeschooling years were replete with reading aloud. We read our prayers aloud as we worshipped together in the morning. We read the Bible passages for the day aloud. In addition we had a daily novel we were going through, and we also read through ancient, medieval and modern plays together. I would estimate that the totality of our daily readings amounted to 90 minutes or more every day. It seems like a lot, you may say, and how can any homeschool spend that much time on just that?

It seems to me that it is a matter of where you put your priorities. Mine were for my students to master language arts and mathematics. Those were the two biggest priorities in our homeschool. As such literature, in particular excellently crafted pieces of literature, were of top priority, and I think much vocabulary and advanced sentence structures ‘sneaked’ into my kids’ brains as they were immersed in Euripides, Shakespeare, Dickens, and Tolstoy. I have never regretted those hours of reading aloud. (Did I mention that the kids had another read-aloud-book they did with their father in the evenings?) We read and read, and when we finally compiled the kids’ reading portfolios for college applications, their lists were impressively long, and varied. (Excepting my one sin, that I did not spend very much time in 20th century lit, comparatively).

Today I teach college, physical sciences, mostly physics. I would say that the literary deficit of the students I encounter is profoundly disturbing. WHAT? you may protest, You teach physics. How would you know about their lack of literature?

Science is generally (and traditionally) taught in retrospect. Physics in particular is always honoring the giants that brought us to the next level of our understanding of the material universe. My students have no sense of who Aristotle was, when he lived, what his civilization was like, or why he is important. Ditto for the era of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell, and so forth. A strong basis in literature expands students’ minds and helps them engage with cultures of the past in ways that help them … yes!!! Even in science 🙂

If I may be didactic here for a moment, I would say. Spend your summer planning your reading ‘program’ for the fall. What Scripture do you want to read daily? (we cycled through the same 5 psalms as a prayer opener for every morning all school year, in addition to our daily Gospel fix). What novel do you want to read aloud? What play would engage your students in such a way that they can each read one character’s lines and be actively part of the readings? (Plato’s Dialogues, incidentally, along with other ancient writings, are written as dialogues and would make excellent read alouds for highschoolers. They are not that hard to understand.)

And then there is poetry: Over two school years I plowed through all of the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid as part of our morning readings. Fagels’ translations of all three are easily readable and fun!!! We also read Spenser’s Fairie Queene, Book I aloud, and I survived Paradise Lost… beautiful lyrics. I don’t think anyone beats Milton when it comes to majestic language.

For fun, we spent a season in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and also Jeeves and Wooster.

I miss much of homeschooling now that my kids are all college aged and home only sporadically, reading most of all. We plowed through the greats, and they were so much more enjoyable for having been read aloud, by me, or better yet, by my students.

🙂