I recently reviewed The Seven Laws of Teaching, an 1886 manual for teachers by professor John Milton Gregory that is still recommended in Classical circles today. Teachers often hold up the Seven Laws as a model worthy of emulation, and evaluate their own performance against it. Here’s a paraphrased list: Master the subject to be […]
Wordsworth and his contemporaries sparked an artistic revolution, the effects of which we’re still feeling.
To all parents and teachers who have ever attempted a lesson in literature and composition: Does the following teaching strategy sound familiar to you? A teacher assigns a work of literature, say The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. After the students have read the novel, he takes the opportunity afforded by a particular scene or
Many people claim that literary analysis ruins reading – but that perspective reveals a misunderstanding of the term “analysis”
When we idolize the glories of civilizations past, we often mistake flowers for seeds, and put our hope in something which has already withered and fallen
As much as the past has to teach us, we can never live there. To assume that we ought to is to nurse an unfulfillable longing; teaching our students to do the same is to encourage fantasy.
Neither Beowulf nor Hrothgar is the correct exemplar in Beowulf, for the poem offers no exemplar. Instead, it offers a chance for readers to identify with the plight of all mankind.
The glory of literature is that it makes the Great Conversation possible across the ages, between men and women from different worlds.
My students often blush at the irony of the image of Odysseus’ marriage bed for Odysseus himself hardly deserves the appellation “faithful” – but is there more to it than meets the eye?
Thank God for an eternal place, of which these barns and hills are but dim reflections, and thank God for “children’s books” that ever so gently help us face the grownup issues of our world
