Learning in Wartime - Our Homeschooling Year

As our school year begins in the midst of our family's medical crisis, I was encouraged by reading C.S. Lewis' Learning in Wartime from his Weight of Glory essays. Lewis was reflecting on how the seemingly mundane activities of university life could continue when it looked as if all Europe would fall:

"...how can we--continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance?..."

But the answer is in seeing our true situation in all its perspective: "The war creates no absolutely new situation; it siply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life." Life has never been normal..."

"The work of a Beethoven and the work of a charwoman bcome spiritual on precisely the same condition, that of being offered to God, of being done humbly "as to the Lord."...

As we begin this school year, I realize it's our most ambitious one yet in terms of workload for our 12 year old son. We are encouraging him to be more independent with managing his workload and time management, and he will be taking 4 online courses, two at the high school level.

Two resources that might be helpful for saving money on books and curricula:



Paperbackswap.com allows you to swap already read (or outgrown) paperbacks for free with other members. You only pay postage when you mail it to another member, and in return they pay postage when they send it to you. We use Paypal to print mailing labels and just mail the books by putting them in our mailbox (no trips to the post office).

Another resource we've found helpful is Homeschool Buyer's Co-op. Membership is free. They block together to obtain discounts for curriculum. Discovery's United Streaming membership is now $70 cheaper ($129 per year) because 200 people have signed up.

Homeschooling 2007-8

Latin 1 - Schola Tutorials
Intro to Great Books - Schola Tutorials
Logic - Biola Logic
Etymology / Vocabulary - CTD Northwestern
Chemistry - - CyberEd and Apologia Chemistry
Writing - - Progymnasmata through WritingAssessment.com
Math - - SkillsTutor.com, Saxon, Mathematics: A Human Endeavor
Music - : Enjoyment of Music and Norton Online Listening Lab
Art - Teaching Company A History of European Art

Introduction to Western Philosophy and Literature

Too many books, too little time?

Check out Glyn Hughes's Squashed Philosophers, a site that has brief synopses (with direct excerpts from the original texts) of all the major philosophers, from ancient (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Augustine...) to modern (Satre, Turing, Popper).

Hughes also has a page for Squashed Writers (a.k.a. "All the books you think you ought to have read")...starting with Caesar's Commentaries on the Gallic Wars and so far through Kafka's Metamorphosis.

What's Your Lifetime Reading List?

In case you haven't seen it, here's Hugh Hewitt's chit chat with David Allen White and John Mark Reynolds about their picks for a Lifetime Book Reading List, or What Every College Freshman and Sophomore Should Read.... For more details, check out the link, but here's my tally of their titles:

The Bible, Shakespeare, Plato's Republic, Dialogues of Plato, The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, David Copperfield, Brothers Karamazov, Brideshead Revisited,, Gulag Archipelago, The Odyssey, Aristotle's Ethics, Oedipus Rex, Augustine's Confessions, Second Treatise on Government by Locke, The Aeneid, The Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address, Plutarch, History of the English Speaking People, Dicken's A Child's History of England, Birth of the Modern, The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, The Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, Wealth of Nations, Communist Manifesto, Origin of Species, On the Genealogy of Morals, Civilization and Its Discontents, Abolition of Man, Oresteia,, Summa Theologica, Pascal's Pensees, Pride and Prejudice, Immortal Poems of the English Language, Moby Dick, Essays by Montaigne, Canterbury Tales, The Prince, The Faeire Queene, Calvin's Institutes, Song of Roland, Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass, Paradise Lost, Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, Cicero's On Friendship and On Duties, Hobbes' Leviathan, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Poems of T.S. Eliot, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, Flannery O'Connor, Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon, Percy's Lost in the Cosmos.

Many of the classics are available to read online:

Internet Classics Archive
Online Library of Liberty
E-text Catalog at Johnstonia (scroll down)
Malaspina Great Books Curriculum Resources

Really Learning Latin: Vocabulary, Grammar, Translation, and Wheelocks

When we first started learning Latin, we were delighted learn some ancient Roman or Biblical sayings, and delighted to see how quickly we could be up-and-running. But we hit the wall, and soon found what people meant when the said, "You can't REALLY learn Latin without learning the grammar."

For young children, "soft" Latin programs like Minimus, Latina Christiana, or Prima Latina are probably best, but if you think your student would like to some day continue on in Latin at college, then Latin grammar should be tackled as soon as it is developmentally possible.

An example: if a student has only learned vocabulary or famous phrases, she may be perplexed about how to translate a sentence like: Nauta magnam poêtae fâmam nôn laudat. Who's the subject and how do you figure out which noun is which?

Step 1: It's handy to know the most common word order for Latin Sentences:
Subject - subject's modifiers - Indirect Object - Direct Object - Adverbial Words or Phrases - and Verb.

Step 2: Look for the subject and the noun:
Nauta magnam poêtae fâmam nôn laudat.

Step 3: Look at the word endings - and figure out what function the different nouns are serving in the sentence.
Nauta magnAM poêtAE fâmAM nôn laudat.

The AM will tell me that it's fame that's the direct object (The sailor doesn't praise the reputation, not The sailor doesn't praise the poet), or accusative case. The same ending of magnam means it's paired with fâmam (so great reputation, not great poet), and the AE identifies poêtae as genitive (possessive) so it could be translated as "of the poet".

Final translation: The sailor does not praise the great reputation of the poet.

Now, I confess my son and I still run through the chant "a, ae, ae, am, a; ae arum, is, as, is) to jog our memories for the noun endings, but with more practice we wnat to be able see a word ending and know exactly what function (or possibility of functions) that word has in the sentence. Exact grammar terms have to be learned because it allows communicate precisely about word functions to others when questions arise.

There are many resources for Wheelock's Latin on the web. Before we advance to the next chapter, we first do the self check with drills at University of Houston Latin (Scroll down to the Course 1301 drills). Afterwards we can follow up with Dr J's Latin Grammar Explanations or check out Dale Grote's Latin Study Guide if we have any questions.

Additionl Resources for Latin Online Practice that you may find helpful:
University of Victoria Latin Exercises
Latin Wheelock Practice at Quia.com
Wheelocks Audio
Real Latin Inscriptions

Beyond Clapping for Credit - History Cards

When I was in college, there were many joke nick-names for courses, and one (Music Appreciation) was facetiously called "Clapping for Credit." As a homeschooler, it's incredibly easy to slip into a clapping-for-credit mode, and we've found that if we don't require some quizzing (narration ala Charlotte Mason, or otherwise), we have a student who seems to be familiar with a lot, but verbally able to describe little.

Recently we'd been enjoying Professor Rufus Fear's Famous Romans Series from the Teaching Company, but after finishing the first half of his lectures, we were a little alarmed by how little our guy could narrate back the salient points of the people and main events discussed in the course. I think it surprised him.

What we've added now (and seems to help) - are cards that we made to practice the names, people, and place.



On one side is the person or event, on the other, bullet points detailing key facts. Just a dressed up version of an index card. We had some punched out card stock, but regular card stock would also probably work fine. A blank template can be downloaded here.

This has worked out so well, we're going to use them for other subjects, too.