Self-Education
Thursday 
in mid-afternoon 
Mystie
I enjoy literature, yet even with my English major background my excursions into literature are hardly either deep or broad. Not surprisingly, I learned more about the books I taught to middle-schoolers than the books I was taught in college, and it turns out I taught them in a fairly unconventional way.
We read books.
We read classics.
We read whole books; classics in their entirety. Then we talked about them. We kept notebooks with vocab words and character summaries. They took notes from my lectures and from their discussions. You could say it was like a college class, with the topics geared toward their younger age and with rather more plot overview to keep everyone on the same page. But, even in my college classes I only had one 400-level class wherein we read the entirety of the books we were to study, and in that we only read 4 novels (they were all substantially sized) in the semester.
I found out last year — because a former student of mine enrolled in the local prep school — that even there, the freshman English class only read two books the entire year.
I’m not sure why I set up my class as I did. I was given the task of teaching them some classics, and so I had them read them. It only seemed logical to me. It still only seems logical to me. It wasn’t too much for most of them, and only 3 or 4 out of my 8-10 students were really exceptional. 2-3 were on the lower-average or struggling side and even yet they did better than their parents thought they would.
We read The Odyssey and The Aeneid, Hesiod and Gilgamesh, Oedipus Rex and Beowulf; we read Dante and Chaucer and Malory, Everyman and Piers Plowman, Faerie Queene and Song of Roland. We only abridged Chaucer and Malory. We read 6-8 works a year. 13 and 14 and 15 — and I even had an 11 year old one year — do not need things watered down for them. When given a challenge, they rise to it. They are ready to taken seriously and ready to grow into the adults they will become; they need someone who’ll treat them with respect. Ok, that’s a side tangent and pet peeve, nevermind on that one for now.
Most of what I got out of college, the works I remembered and even a few I never read in college, I have now taught. Those I have a firm grasp of. But if I look at a Great Books list I have merely scratched the surface. If I look at my own library I’ve collected from retiring professors, library sales, and used book stores, I’ve hardly begun. If it involves anything after 1770 or so, I am completely clueless.
I’ve had a year off from teaching and have had a year of reading only for pleasure. Of course, that has included biographies and histories, but mostly novels, and all on the subject of the Tudors, other English monarchs, or other periods in ancient or medieval English history. I know, I’m weird. :)
But this year I’ll be leading a group with three of my exceptional students who are now 15 & 16; we’ll be meeting informally once a week, reading literature together. We’ve already begun, we’re in the middle of The Odyssey (these students only went through Medieval Lit, so we’re starting with some ancient, then skimming the 16-18th centuries, and a tad of the 19th. At least one of those students has already taken flack from her friends that she’s bizarre for wanting, for asking, to read The Odyssey during summer break, not to mention the fact that she’s really enjoying it and taking notes and looking up words and copying particularly pleasing phrases. But it is fun. And just being halfway into the first book has given me that little taste once more of real education. More than reading a few paragraphs and listening to an instructor give you the gist of the rest and the accepted reading of the themes, really settling down and savoring a well-written piece of work, getting caught up in language and metaphor and images.
So I have a real plan for this next year and a semblance of order and accountability to keep it going. I have 12 books to read over the year with my lit group. I have selected 10 other titles from my personal collection that I have not yet read that I will also read. I will take notes. I will read for education and not simply pleasure.
I really want to study the romantic to twentieth-century literature, but to do so would involve reading a history and a culture/philosophy overview for those centuries as well; moreover, I would need to pursue more scholarly writings to really get the feel for analyzing those works. Remember, I’m an English major. This is all interesting to me; I would want to know. I decided that this year will be a “getting into the groove” year. I will read the books for my group and all the books I’ve chosen from my collection are pre-1750. Then next year I will tackle Enlightenment (Endarkenment), Romantic, and Modern. My guess is that my lit group will only last this year and they’ll all go on to the community college next year, but no one knows yet. :) Maybe next year I’ll have to start an adult reading group. Maybe the year after next, after I’ve studied all the major movements. However, the great thing about a student group is that it’s their job to keep up a good pace and flesh things out and work at it. I doubt an adult group would be able to maintain the same focus; I’m sure it wouldn’t meet once a week!
Besides actual interest and desire, I want to form a habit of deliberate reading and studying because children learn by the example and model of their teachers. If I want them to love learning, then I must love it. If I want them to eventually become self-educating, then I must be self-educating. Moreover, in a daily world of breakfast, lunch, dinner, dishes, laundry, wash, rinse, and repeat all over again, I think that having some exercise for my brain and for my person, I need a thinking hobby. Sure, I crochet, and that’s creative, but rather brainless. Sure, I cross-stitch, and that’s creative, less brainless, and involves exactly the right amount of math for a hobby of mine, but for me it’s a “use of time” hobby and not an expression of myself. It doesn’t keep me interesting, as one friend would say. :) I want a hobby that gives me something to think about while washing dishes, a hobby that gives me insights and things to say at dinnertime. Not simply reading, but studying literature, is an interest and a developed skill I have that I don’t want to lose and forget in the doldrums of everyday life.
So, here’s my list of goals for the year:
1. Read
(the first 12 titles are for a lit group with three or four homeschool high school students that I am leading and hostessing, bolded titles being ones I’ve read before; the remaining are titles I own but have not yet read.)
*Odyssey*, Homer (Fitzgerald)
*Oedipus Rex*, Sophocles (Lattimore)
*Aeneid*, Virgil (Fitzgerald)
*Til We Have Faces*, C.S. Lewis
*Beowulf*, (Heaney)
Shakespeare play TBD
*Faustus*, Marlowe
*Paradise Lost*, Milton (only read selections)
*Gulliver’s Travels*, Swift (only read selections)
*Oliver Twist*, Dickens
*Mansfield Park*, Austin
*Jane Eyre*, Charlotte Bronte
*The Christian Imagination*, Leland Ryken
*City of God*, Augustine
*Troilus & Criseyde*, Chaucer
*Legend of Good Women*, Chaucer
*Pensees*, Pascal
*Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse* (202 poems), various
*Twelfth Night*, Shakespeare
*Merry Wives of Windsor*, Shakespeare
*Bondage of the Will*, Luther
*Don Quixote*, Cervantes
2. Keep a reading notebook for the above titles
3. Write a blog post on each one
4. Write 3 literary analysis papers
5. Read through the Bible, beginning to end
These and my goals for the boys are posted on a page on the right, where I will strike things off as they are accomplished. We’ll be finishing *The Odyssey* this week and I’m about 1/3 of the way through *The Christian Imagination*.
I’m excited for this year. :)
(MCL)
with 
(personal library)
