Any Veterans Here Who Have HS Their Children Successfully? I've never served in the military, but seems to me that experiences like going through boot camp, learning to drive a tank, and eating, sleeping and working on someone else's schedule are ideal preparations for homeschooling...

Whatever happened to these PBS "reality" series -- seemed like they were a lot more interesting and historical than the usual reality twattle.

I would like to humbly point out that a textbook is not a curriculum, and that a lot of the appeal of the "oldschool" materials isn't necessarily that they teach in a different way, but that they teach towards a different curriculum. If I were in the enviable position of needing to spend money now for the long haul, the first thing I'd want to do is review my curricular goals for the next few years -- what do I want them to learn? I'd then think about how I best teach and how they best learn, and only then think about materials that meet at this intersection.

"The Greek Way", by Edith Hamilton

The answer key that I've found is for the sixth, which works for me, as I found the 6ed of Wheelock for $5 at my local used book store... I'm told there's a version for the seventh which you may get from the publisher by asking nicely, but I don't have any first hand experience with that.

I hear this a lot, but I'd just like to point out that English -> Latin is ten times harder than translating Latin to English. It just is.

A bright 7th or 8th grader could certainly start Wheelock, but you'd want to make sure that she's got a good handle on English grammar first. If she doesn't, time is probably better spent brushing up on that rather than diving into Latin. Also, the answer key for Wheelock is floating around the net if you care to look -- it's really good, it doesn't just have answers, but some explanations and common mistakes explicated.

I think this satire is so close to life that it kind of isn't funny.

What kind of reference do you mean? I like "Allen and Greenough's New Latin Grammar", which is a 19th century grammar now in the public domain, which can be downloaded for free from google books or other places, to check up on obscure grammar points. If you need a human being to answer a question, the textkit.com forums can be helpful, and there are a couple of other similar forums on the net. www.perseus.tufts.edu has all kinds of interesting resources, including parsing tools, where you can type in an inflected word, and it can tell you all the possible forms it could be; it also has the ability to generate word lists from classical texts.

I think that so little is known about ancient music that there isn't much to study. Robert Greenberg touches on it for a few minutes in his TTC series "How to listen to great music" series. Maybe also interesting to note that in Latin "carmen" means both poem and song interchangeably.

Is there a place nearby that does have fast wifi, where you could either drop them off to watch the videos, or download them quickly, then watch them at home?

I absolutely agree with posters that a large vocabulary is a result of a lot of reading and inquiry, not the cause of it. Perhaps one difference between German and English is that there are so many more English words, or so we are told. We in America have an odd relationship with our words. I think that spelling bees are an American (or perhaps English-speaking) phenomenon. I'm skeptical of the practical value of a large vocabulary, beyond some working point. For example, I know what the word "terpsichorean" means, but I'm not nearly sanctimonious enough to use it in speech or writing (with the exception of this kind of irony). However, I do need to be pragmatic about the value of knowing these sorts of words for getting good SAT scores, and so I teach this vocabulary by direct instruction. I can't believe that direct instruction is less effective than reading. How many SAT vocab words are there in, say, "Tale of Two Cities", compared to the weeks it takes to read it? The words at the high end of the SAT vocabulary lists are so rare that I don't think it is possible to learn them just by reading literature. I'd rather focus on reading good literature, learning foreign languages, and writing instruction, but those are hard to have standardized tests for, and so they aren't directly tested by college entrance exams. The somewhat good news is that I think I can do a good enough job on the SAT prep kinds of teaching without ignoring the "good stuff', but I am somewhat saddened that I have to do it at all.

Maybe I've cited this link before,but I love, love, love this 10 year old op-ed piece about memorizing poetry in the nyt: http://www.nytimes.c...-eloquence.html Where the author talks about all the poetry her 85 year old mother learned in public K12 schools and could recite all throughout her life. Inspiring.

:iagree: Why does she need a CA license at all, even after she turns 18? Where does she plan to maintain her residency?

As it is generally used, roughly 2 years of high school Latin classes will cover the 40 chapters (probably most courses require a bit more time), or 2 semesters of college Latin classes at 4 or 5 credits each semester. So, roughly 20 chapters per college semester, or a bit more than one chapter a week.

Not to thread-jack, but I wonder why this was? Is it just a cultural difference? Is the education there now as rigorous as during the USSR days?

In addition to all the good comments above, I find that history aimed at children seems especially hard. Authors seem to find it too easy to remove nuance, wanting to dumb down motivations, and reduce difficult choices and situations to simple things.

What an interesting question. I counted something like 30 (full-time ?) adcoms listed on Duke's page, so $2.3m seems a bit high for salaries alone, but add in the travel they must do, the marketing material sent out, and the legions of smiling undergrads who are paid (they are paid, right?) to lead campus tours, and it doesn't seem like they can be making too much money from application fees. More fun math: If each adcom gets one section of the admissions (seems unlikely), each one looks at about 1,000 applications and selects 60. Must be a tough job, don't know if I could make those decisions.

I find it a bit odd that a movie made in the 70s about something that happened in the 40s would be stricken as "dated".

Exactly. And unlike for nouns and adjectives, it's easier to memorize these (and all the pronouns) "across" instead of "down", as there are more patterns there. That is memorize in this order: "hic, haec, hoc, huius, huius, huius, huic, huic, huic", and not "hic, huius, huic, hunc..."

I'd also look at the Latin for a New Millenium textbooks. It mixes both the reading and the grammar approaches, it covers some medieval Latin, is lavishly illustrated, and has lots of online support at the publisher's website. Main downside is that the books are kind of spendy, but LNM is really aimed at high school audience.

The above could be the "spine to end all spines". Highly recommended, but there's a lot there. Other well-known top tier histories: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire The History of English Speaking Peoples (or, really, anything by Churchill) The Making of the Atomic Bomb The Double Helix The Killer Angels (and the rest of the Shaara books about the civil war) The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich All the President's Men

After the 2nd year is when all the good stuff begins! It is so much dull work to memorize all the paradigms, that you might as well put them to good use, and read the classics in their original language, to read the self-aggrandizing propaganda of Caesar, and think about modern equivalents. To read the grand speeches of Cicero, and hear them echoed by modern statesmen. Ponder the grandeur that is the Aeneid. This is really when the thinking begins, not the low-level grammatical construction and deconstruction.

I don't think that placement test came from Singapore Mathâ„¢. With a quick glance, I found what looks like another typo, which doesn't give me warm fuzzies about the instruction: Uh, what?

If I didn't put a limit on reading at bedtime, young ones would stay up to all hours, and everyone would be grumpy all day long.