Thank you SO much! That gives me lots of ideas. Gratefully, Julie

Any ideas? Thank you in advance! Julie

I'm WAY too ambitious when it comes to books. I think to myself, foolishly, it's in English, why can't I read it? The funny thing about N&N is that I actually owned it once before, found it hard to get through, gave up, and sold it. Now I want it back. But while I will rashly spend $35 on a really hard book I'm not likely to ever finish once, I can't bear to do it twice, so my librarian is hunting it down for me on ILL.

Thank you. I will. Moving that one up on my list...

When you all read Till We Have Faces, will you report back? Or maybe we can start a separate discussion of it somewhere? I read that book twice and somehow I think missed the big picture. Very engaging story, not at all hard to read, but both times at the end I felt that I missed the underlying point of it. But that was years ago, and I have read and learned much since then, so it could be that I would have a very different take on it now. If you all hadn't given me so many other things to read and listen to right now (grrr....) I would pick it up and reread it right now, but the Abolition of Man and Norms and Nobility and Leisure the Basis of Culture and many other things are currently in the queue...

Can you link the Til We Have Faces talk? I tried to search for it and didn't see it.

Oooh...I didn't know there was a Part II! Thank you! (Now busily plotting and planning how I can possibly scrape together the funds and the time to attend this year's conference....)

This was from Andrew's "Mimetic Teaching and the Cultivation of Virtue" talk. Some notes from my notes, and I hope I'm stating these things correctly (you'll just have to listen for yourself to make sure that I am :001_smile:): He said virtue is a cultivated faculty, or power I guess would be another way to say it. He equates virtue with blessedness, which is the "full realization of who you are," and says that education is meant to cultivate this state. One does this by cultivating the faculties of attentiveness, memory, and contemplation--and *then* creativity--all of which together are what he calls mimesis, imitation. You do this in three steps: 1) Embody truth in particulars. Present types. 2) Compare the types. 3) Student expresses the truth in his own words. End goal: Freedom to bring their own souls into harmony and an increased capacity to know and enjoy God. Who wouldn't want *that*?

One more thing by way of encouragement, and then I'll go quietly back into the shadows again: Andrew Kern might as well have been speaking directly to me in his talks, because all the things he said *not* to do I have done: *Don't copy what modern educators are doing in your school. Check. *Don't say "Knowledge is power." (Makes knowledge utilitarian instead of virtuous.) Check. *Don't tell your child "You are smart." (That is a burden to them; better to say "Well done.") Check. *Don't undercut a child's faculty for virtue (if you do so, you are doing the work of Satan). Check. I have made *all* of the mistakes, these and many more. But thank God we are redeemable, and we don't have to remain in our errors forever. "The soul that perceives truth is transformed by the truth it perceives." --Guess Who

By the way, this doesn't mean I'm going to toss out all the workbooks. I like Memoria Press materials very much, and they will be helpful to us. But I'm not going to say "We're doing Memoria Press"; they are not teaching my children, I am, judiciously using their books as tools. That's what Andrew Kern means, I think, when he says the particular curriculum doesn't matter all that much. (Why did it take me this long to figure all this out?)

But see, what is so inspiring about this thread is that it isn't about a "fad" at all! It isn't about this or that curriculum, or emulating this or that person's homeschool. It's about rediscovering and regaining the principles behind what we do that may have been lost along the way. And there is NOTHING faddish about classical education at all--the very opposite! Like others here, I too had lost my way. All the grand ideals with which I began 8 years ago had been laid aside when confronted with the hard reality that my children didn't seem to be anything like those eager, inquisitive, quick learners which populate other families; and lacking the background and talent of those gifted teachers that seem to be able to teach anyone anything, I concluded that the acquisition of wisdom and virtue was simply out of our reach. But I couldn't send them to school, because there aren't any within our reach that teach the things I want them to learn. I did at least see the truth of the idea that sitting around at home reading books all day would be better than a "wrong education," so I kept them home, even though I completely doubted both my ability to teach and their ability to learn. Would that we had only "read books all day"! We'd have been much better off. Instead, I too succumbed to the insidious cultural pressure to teach them at least some of what their peers are learning in school, lest they be left behind (or taken away from me by some well-meaning family member), so we settled down to the drudgery of "getting through school" for the sake of getting through, and we've all been thoroughly miserable. But this thread, and digging into Circe and listening to some of the talks, has reignited that fire. And there ARE practical applications amidst all the theorizing--and Andrew Kern is right that is really ISN'T all that hard. You just have to know what you're about, and don't let your past failures, or lack of education, or children's imperfections (which are so very human!) paralyze you into inaction. I tried out a few of these principles this past week on my 12yo son, a resistant learner if there ever was one. At least, that is what I had always labled him. I was reading him a book about the building of the Parthenon. I had glanced over the chapter and thought surely this would not engage him--he's not interested in architecture, I know nothing about it, what could there be to talk about? Formerly I would have just read it without comment and put it away, and neither of us would have learned anything. This time I read it with enthusiasm, figuring we might as well learn something about this together, stopping along the way to make comments, ask questions, look at the pictures, make comparisons, and was shocked to discover he was actually somewhat interested, and had comments and comparisons of his own to add. I remembered the "Should_____have done___?" question, and used it, and it worked! Should Pericles have spent public money building the Parthenon? I didn't know the answer off the top of my head before I asked the question, but we thought about it and explored it together. We were *thinking* about and engaging a question, an idea. And the course of our conversation led to other things. I made a shocking discovery. My son is not resistant to learning--he was only resistant to those mind-numbing texbooks and workbooks I've been making him labor over. They did not engage him. But conversation does--which I should have known, because he has always enjoyed me reading aloud to him, but I just never took it to the next level of discussing what we were reading in meaningful ways--and even if I don't know what I'm talking about half the time, we can explore ideas together. That is what I am taking away from all this that is going to be so revolutionary for us, even though there's nothing revolutionary about it at all! One last thing: I would encourage everyone who has hung on thus far to listen to Andrew Kern's talk "A Contemplation of Nature" (it's free! Here: http://circeinstitute.com/free-audio/). If that doesn't put the fire in your belly, nothing will!

Whoa. This is hardly the place for that. Should I as a Catholic not look at any Protestant websites concerning education because they are not "an authentically, loyal to the Magisterium, Catholic website"? Just asking.

[i have been drooling over Memoria Press packages...have pretty much decided...written out my tentative daily plans for gettin' 'er done...and now I have this thread inputting a check into my thoughts] And why would MP *not* provide one possible answer to the question of how to put these ideas into actual practice? I've been wondering that throughout this thread. Aren't the principles behind their curricula very much in alignment with Circe's?

Beth, Thank you for the link above. It looks very interesting; I'll read it later when I have time.