High School Iliad Profile Up

Well, I'm not doing as well as I should be on getting the High School Year One items posted, but I did finally wrap up the piece on the Iliad.

High School Deadline

I've been finding myself putting much more time into the elementary program lately, probably because our oldest is already old enough to enjoy hearing the stories a bit. Thus, progress in getting content up for the high school program has been slower than it should be.

I rather doubt there's anyone out these considering using the program this coming year, but I'm thinking I better crack down and see if I can get Year One of the High School Humanities Program done before the end of the summer (which to give myself time I'll define as the end of August.)

I don't foresee any further changes in the Year One reading list itself. However, I need to finish writing up the notes on each work (including recommendations on which editions to pick) and also complete the scheduling suggestions. Most of which just requires looking over my stacks of books from high school and college, and checking to see if any interesting new translations have come out recently. Not the most romantic work in the world, but very much in need of doing.

First Illustration Up

It's take our illustrator some time to get started on his research and get the first illustration inked, scanned and ready to post, but I'm proud to announce that the first one is now up.

Check out the story of Helen for our first original illustration, with many more to come in the weeks ahead.

Trojan War Stories

For the last month and change (shocking how long these things can take) I've been struggling over turning the Iliad and Odyssey adaptations. In some ways, this has been made more difficult by the fact I've been re-reading the Iliad as I go along, which results in lots of "I can't leave that out!" thinking.

Anyway, I finally got this to something like a finished state, and I've been going through reading the stories aloud to our eldest daughter as bedtime material. However, she's five (at the bottom of the intended age range) and is willing to sit back and listen to anything from Goodnight Moon to selections from Njal's Saga, so I'm not sure that the fact she keeps listening is actually a sign of success, or just general receptivity to reading. Plus she doesn't really have any feedback on whether everything makes sense, is exciting, etc.

So, a request for anyone out there with kids somewhere around 5-9 who's willing to do some experimental reading: I'd very much appreciate it if you'd read over some or all of the following and let me know if these seem like something that your child would enjoy. Better yet, if you can read them aloud to kids and let me know what their feedback is, I'd appreciate it even more.

The Trojan War: A Blind Poet Named Homer

• The Face that Launched a Thousand Ships


• The Wrath of Achilles


• The Trojan Horse

The Wanderings of Odyssues:

• The Lost Hero


• Odysseus Tells His Story


• The Hero Returns

The one thing I haven't finished yet is adding a list of good outside reading (picture books, story books and chapter books dealing with the Trojan War and Odysseus which are recommended if one wants to read further). I have a few old favorites from my childhood, and a bunch of stuff I picked up at the library that I need to look through, but if you have suggestions, do let me know and I'll include them. (Do please note the length and age level.)

Beginning Poetry Memorization

Eleanor (5) and Julia (almost 4) have memories like steel traps. One time watching a movie and they're already quoting dialogue and rattling off lyrics. Therefore, it must be time to start some real poetry memorization.

Children's poetry is tricky stuff -- we wanted something short enough to be memorable, but not too treacly. A while ago I found a copy of Kate Greenaway's Under the Window at a library booksale. I pulled that off the shelf hoping that I could find some simple poem for Julia. I wasn't overly impressed -- the pictures were charming, but the verse was too twee to be worth the effort of memorization. I have a fondness for A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson, but Darwin doesn't always care for the shortest poems therein. (As it turns out, we did find one by Stevenson that we liked for Julia -- see below.) Right now our favorite poetry anthology for the girls is Classic Poetry: An Illustrated Collection, but the poems are too long for the girls to easily master in a week.

In the end, we consulted The Oxford Book of English Verse and The Oxford Book of Children's Verse to select a poem for each girl. For Eleanor we found "Morning Prayer" by Ogden Nash:

Morning Prayer
by Ogden Nash

Now another day is breaking,
Sleep was sweet and so is waking.
Dear Lord, I promised you last night
Never again to sulk or fight.
Such vows are easier to keep
When a child is sound asleep.
Today, O Lord, for your dear sake,
I'll try to keep them when awake.

Julia's was an old classic (though I'd always thought it was just an old nursery rhyme):

There Was a Little Girl
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good
She was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid.

We practiced during the week and had a formal recitation on Sunday evening. For this week we have two new selections.

Eleanor:

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!

--Lewis Carroll

Julia:

Rain
by Robert Louis Stevenson

The rain is raining all around,
It falls on field and tree,
It rains on the umbrellas here,
And on the ships at sea.

Odysseus Draft

I finally completed a draft of The Wanderings of Odysseus. Generally I'm pretty pleased with it, but it's nearly twice the length of any of the other stories so far, so I fear it needs to be cut into two or else pretty seriously shortened.

Feel free to read the draft and provide any other suggestions.

Classical Languages: When and Why?

It seems a generally agreed-upon tenet in certain circles that teaching your children Latin (and possibly Greek as well) is a Good Idea. This fits pretty well with my own inclinations, having been a Classics major and being fairly pleased with my time studying Greek and Latin.

However being currently possessed of rather young children, one of the things I'm less sure of is when to start these languages. My own learning of Latin had a number of false starts and eventually kicked-off for real in high school where I spend a couple years working through Wheelock's Latin, and then Caesar's Gallic Wars and a bit of the Aeneid. All very good stuff, and what grasp I have of formal grammar is definitely attributable to Wheelock. (No blame to my good mother and other teachers -- it's just that I successfully paid fairly little attention to grammatical terminology up to that point since my instincts were generally sound enough to face it.)

However, one of the sources to which I attribute the limits of my mastery of these languages (other than my own failure to apply myself further) is the fact that I started studying them so late, and when I was already very much locked into thinking via English grammar and (especially) vocabulary. (I managed to think in Latin grammar pretty well, but I could never seem to see Latin words as meaning things in their own right so much as "mean this, or sometimes this" sets of translational equivalents. Well, "never" is a strong word, but in most cases my vocabulary was shallow and unnatural.)

A lot of classical education writers seem to suggest kicking off with Latin quite young, perhaps around seven or eight. I can see this as being a good idea in many ways, but I do find myself wondering a bit: where do you go from there? I imagine that it still takes a good two to four years to reach the point where you can read most classical literature with ease, but if you have an eleven-year-old who is fully equipped to read Virgil, Horace and Ovid, that still leaves you with the question of whether a eleven-year-old is well equipped to appreciate those authors.

Maybe its because I came to these authors so late, and thus associate coming to understand them with coming into intellectual adulthood, but I do sort of wonder if having solid Latin and Greek skills at too young an age simply leaves on all dressed up with no where to go. Or, perhaps more likely, in St. Augustine's situation of having been brought to the point of being able to read the classics, but being bored by them and so writing them off more or less permanently.

I fear that much of Classical literature is a rather adult taste, both artistically and intellectually, so it seems like the challenge would be to come up with readings that would make classical languages interesting and rewarding to a younger child. (I suppose one could focus more on religious texts early on. The vulgate and Koine Greek are both fairly easy examples of their language, and there's a great deal in the scriptures which is quite readable at a young age.)

Some writers don't seem too worried about this because their primary interest in Latin and Greek is expanding one's vocabulary and mastering logical/grammatical concepts. But in our case, I'd definitely like to give our children at least a good chance of enjoying real Classical literature in the original language, whether that actually becomes their specialty or merely a background cultural literacy that they bring to the rest of their lives.

The Iliad in Three Pages or Less

I've got the elementary program version of the mythology which is mostly covered in the Iliad up under the title The Wrath of Achilles. I'm worried it's still a bit long, but it's a start.

Hmmmmm...

Some things are harder to explain at a child-friendly level than others. Explaining how Helen came to be the daughter of Zeus may be at the harder end of the scale...



Though there's also always the tradition that Helen was the daughter of Zeus and Nemesis, and that her egg was then given to Leda who raised her as her own.

Please, Daddy!

I may need to jump ahead a bit chronologically in writing the Elementary Program, as the small fry are agitating to hear about the Trojan War.

I'm trying to decide exactly how to break the story up. I really like the narrative structure of the Iliad, but I think that starting near the end of the story would be a bit hard for such young kids to handle. So I may go ahead and start with the marriage of Helen, the apple of discord, etc. I might do three stories: The Tojan War (chronological version of the war up through the death of Hektor, or maybe even Achilles), the Trojan Horse (fall of Troy drawn from the version in the Aeneid) and The Wanderings of Odysseus.

Egypt-mania

I've got the first two pieces on Ancient Egypt up. The first one, which I have a few fears might be a little dry, is on The Rise of Egypt.

The second one is plenty of fun as it covers the Egyptian creation myth and also the story of Isis and Osiris. I hope it doesn't indulge in too much myth-speak, but I'm pretty confident the content will be interesting to kids. Let me know any reactions.

Multum Non Multa

My wife sent me a link to another book about using a classical curriculum The Latin Centered Curriculum, by Andrew Campbell. One of Campbell's big points is multum non multa or "much, not many". He's concerned at the length of the reading lists that many classical curriculums suggest. He make the point (I think in some cases valid) that the curriculums that advise the reading of countless juvenile historical novels are effectively requiring that the student churn quickly through lots of not terribly deep writing.

However, he's also very down on long reading lists of "great books". For instance, he's rather shocked that one seventh grade reading lists gives students five weeks to read the Iliad while simultaneously reading "a work of theology, a study on ancient cities, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and a challenging adult novel by C. S. Lewis."

Well, I'll admit that I'd hold off on Gilgamesh (and indeed the Iliad) until high school, but at the same time I'm a bit amused at his indignation over reading a "challenging adult novel by C. S. Lewis" quickly while reading other things as well. I love C. S. Lewis' novels, but all of them can be read quickly and easily. They may be morally or intellectually challenging, but they're not challenging to read.

As it happens, though, I've been working through the Iliad at one book a day at lunch time. It's been six or seven years since I last read Homer, and I've really been enjoying it. One of my purposes, however, was also to decide how much time needed to be scheduled for reading the Iliad and the Odyssey in the High School Humanities Program. I've been finding that a slow, careful reading of one book (anywhere from 450 to 900 lines - 10 to 20 pages) of the Iliad runs me an average of 30 minutes. Still, it's dense reading, and you want to pay good attention, so I don't think you'd want a student powering through too quickly and losing detail. I'm thinking I'll recommend reading two books a day, three to four days a week, thus finishing the Iliad and Odyssey in 3-4 weeks each. This strikes me as a pretty slow, steady pace. Now, I'm talking about a ninth grader instead of a seventh grader, but I still don't know of Campbell would approve.

Three Times the Charm?

Dorothy Sayers' essay "The Lost Tools of Learning" has achieved near sola scriptura standing among a certain stripe of homeschooler, with a number of curriculums or curriculum suggestions based upon it's grammar, logic, rhetoric thrice-through structure. It's been a while since I'd read the essay (as opposed to books on how to implement the essay's suggestions) so I took a copy along on our recent family vacation and read it over to see how off-shoots fit the original.

Rereading Sayers, I found her essay refreshing, incisive and engaging. She's also, however, much vaguer in some of her recommendations than I had imagined. Although she's quite clear about the stages of grammar, logic and rhetoric (and that the general approaches of these three disciplines should be applied to all subject-matter studied) she doesn't give specific prescriptions on what should be studied in each stage at a subject level. (Indeed, part of her point is that the idea of "subjects" is unfortunate.)

This leaves me still sitting with one of my concerns about several of the "classical education" curriculums that I've looked over. The general approach seems to be to do everything three times. So for instance, you go through world history one time each at a grammar, logic and rhetoric level.

Now, repetition is often good when learning things, but I wonder if this rule of three is actually the way to go. Part of me wonders if the logic stage would lend itself well to a number of 1-3 month intensive unit studies which dug into how exactly particular events or trends came to be, and what their results were. If you've already laid down a good chronological foundation in the grade 1-4 level, you should be able to do a lot of unit studies at the grade 5-8 level (and perhaps a year of strictly American History) and then come back at the high school level to put it all together with another four year run through world history, this time focusing on primary source material.

Thinking back to my junior high years, I certainly consumed huge numbers of straight history and biography (the Landmark Books were a big favorite of mine in grades 4-6) but I also thrived on digging into analysis topics that would lend themselves well to applying logical structure to a unit study such as "Why the South lost the Civil War" or "Why the French Revolution Happened" or "How the Tsar Fell".

A Bible for Very Young Catholics

This looks like a good Bible story resource for very young children. It's a children's Bible published by ACN (Aid to the Church in Need). Pope Benedict XVI distributed four copies of it during his recent trip to Fazenda da Esperança in Brazil, which brought the number of copies distributed in that country up to 10 million.

The book can be viewed online, but I couldn't find any information on how to order a hard copy. So I contacted ACN by email and was told that copies were available from:

Aid to the Church in Need
725 Leonard Street
PO Box 220384
Brooklyn, NY 11222-0384

Suggested donation is $2.00, but I'd suggest sending them a bit more.

Alternate Blog

I set up an additional Humanities Program Blog on homeschoolblogger.com on which to post excepts from stuff as they go up on the main site.

I'm not looking at making it the main blog, but I wanted to provide a little more search/link fodder, and have something out there to try to gradually draw in homeschooler attention.

In Defense of Humanism

Looking at the rather slow rate of visitors here and on the main Humanities Program site, I got to thinking it was time to start trying to get up to speed on classical education and great books influenced homeschooling sites. Google and other site owners tend to agree: if you want to receive links you need to give links.

So I was reading around on a few "classical education" sites and immediately came across this on a site called Trivium Pursuit:

Is Classical Education reading Homer and Plato, or Caesar and Cicero? Many classical educators would say yes – reading such literature is an essential part of a classical education. But, does an unbridled focus upon classical – Greek and Roman – literature lead us toward Christ?

We define a Classical Education differently. We pursue a classical model and a classical method for education – namely, the Trivium – but we have only an incidental interest in the classical humanist literature. We do not want to pursue these three tools of learning – classical languages, skill in thinking, and skill in communication – so that we can really read Homer and really think like Aristotle and really speak like Demosthenes. As Christians, we want to learn languages, logic, and rhetoric so that we can really read, and think, and speak – period! We want to master these useful tools, but we do not want to use these tools as the ancient Greeks and Romans used them. They used these tools to serve everything except the true and living God. We want to use them to serve nothing but the true and living God. The Greeks and Romans took these tools and used them to pursue their own purposes. We are only reclaiming what is rightfully the inheritance of the godly, cleaning them up, and turning them back to serve our Lord. The Scriptures contain everything we need to test every word of man, and to convert what is redeemable to godly use. Before we can use anything – including classical literature – we must sift it through the critical screen of the Scriptures.

We choose to limit our meaning of "classical" to include only what is of good form and lasting value (= classical), and which conforms to a Biblical standard within a Biblical worldview (= Christian). We must carefully sift everything which is classical in the humanist sense through the critical screen of the Scriptures, and we must give whatever passes that screening a new meaning within the Biblical worldview. So, by "classical," we do not mean all culture and literature of ancient times, or of mediaeval times, or of renaissance times, or even of colonial American times. We do not want to revive some previous period of supposed glory. We are not bound to the classical humanist literature or tradition. We focus instead upon what – out of all of these cultures and times – is redeemable for Christ. We want to sort through the rubble and redeem only what we can bring into conformity to Christian order and under the rule of God’s law.

It strikes me as indicative of the overwhelming success of Sayers' essay "The Lost Tools of Learning" that even someone who lacks interest in much of what Sayers considered the purpose of education to be nonetheless is trying to craft a curriculum in tune with her summation of the scholastic approach to education.

Still, there's something very wrong with the above view, and I say this not only as an intellectual and homeschooling parent but also as a Christian.

We should read the classics, both pagan and Christian, because through reading the words that people have put down throughout the centuries we come to understand better what it is to be human. Our modern understanding of the world is scientifically advanced, but it is certainly not the last word culturally. Through coming to understand how the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Medievals and the people of the Renaissance saw the world, we come to better understand who we are as human beings and how we relate to the world around us.

Nor should this sort of humanism be off limits for Christians. If humanity is made in God's image, then through coming to understand man we come to understand God. Though the scriptures may be the divinely inspired word of God, they are certainly not the only thing worth knowing. If Christians believe that God looked on creation and saw that it was good, then knowledge of the world is never sought in vain.

Next Up, Art & Homer

I've been working through Year One of the High School program knocking out the 'easy stuff' as far as writing the profiles of all the works. The anthologies of Sumerian and Egyptian source material are both up now, as is Gilgamesh.

The next projects: Profile the two art history options to be used throughout. Gombrich is recommended for most, with Janson for those who (and are up for reading through) want a much more in-depth approach. (Gombrich isn't light weight by any standards -- it's more than Janson is just plain massive.)

And then Homer. I'm thinking maybe I should take the Iliad and Odyssey with me on vacation to see if I can get another re-read in and see if I can come up with any fresh thoughts. Plus it would be a good refresher when I write the Homer-based stuff for the elementary program.

The Iceman Cometh

Well, here go my creative writing skills getting their first workout in a while. I just posted a draft of the Ötzi the Iceman story. I did a bunch of reading about him over the last few weeks, so I had all the research, but I hope I managed to come up with a retelling of a possible version of his final hours that will be interesting:

Perhaps he was traveling north over the mountains two friends from his village when they were attacked by raiders from another tribe. One of Ötzi's friends was killed by the attackers' arrows, and Ötzi himself was wounded when he was shot in the back. He fought off one of the attackers with his knife, wounding the enemy tribesman. But Ötzi was hurt again too, his enemy's knife but Ötzi's thumb nearly down to the bone.

At last Ötzi and his surviving companion, also wounded, were alone. Ötzi pulled the two arrows that had killed his friend out of his body, and put the broken arrows into his quiver. Later he would fasten those arrowheads onto new arrows when he was finished making his bow, and perhaps he could avenge his friend's death. Then he and his remaining companion buried their friend under a small pile of stones....

Read the tragic conclusion...

History of Rome Needed

Toss out question for any avid classical history readers out there...

As I go through working over the reading lists for the High School Humanities Program, I'm trying to decide whether to keep Moses Hadas' History of Rome as the high level secondary source on Roman history. I recall it's virtues as being that it's quite concise and readable (I don't want the secondary source to be taking up all sorts of time that could be better devoted to reading Roman authors) yet gives a pretty good feel for Roman history and the ways in which the Roman character changed over the course of the city, republic and empire's history. Hadas war primarily a historian of literature, and it shows.

However, it's out of print -- though still fairly available used.

Does anyone know of a fairly concise and respected history of Rome that's still in print which I should look at as a substitute? I'd be curious to read over something that's more recent which might fill the same niche (Hadas' history was, I believe, written in the early 50s.) However, I haven't heard of anything that sounds like it's trying to do the same thing. Suggestions?

Bronze Age Work Hazards

Or: How Hephaestus Got His Limp

At some point, a smith would connect the properties of the bronze ingot with the properties of the ores going into the smelter, which would save him a lot of work and charcoal blending ingot together. At this point the smith is truly master of his craft, and one can easily imagine that the best smiths would have routinely produced bronzes of much higher quality than normal. Smiths take on legendary or god-like form for the first time.

Arsenic ores are more common than tin ores, and make high-quality bronzes: there are no tin bronzes in Western Asia before 3000 BC. Arsenic bronzes do not cast as well, but are as hard as tin bronzes. The choice between arsenic and tin bronze may not have been easy, even when it became available. The choice may have depended on the ores available locally: arsenic/copper ores are common, while copper/tin ores are rare. We don't know accurately how often arsenate ores occur in copper deposits because the question is not important in modern mining. In this case, it is just possible that Chalcolithic miners were better informed than we are!

After 3000 BC, Cretan and Western Mediterranean bronzes were largely made with arsenic, Egyptian bronzes almost exclusively with arsenic, but Anatolian bronzes were made with both. We suspect that Anatolian bronzes were first made with tin extracted from the mineral stannite. It is difficult to distinguish tin-bearing stannite from the arsenic-bearing minerals arsenopyrite and enargite. Possibly the first use of tin ores stemmed from a simple mistake by prospectors searching for more arsenic-bearing ores.

Eventually smiths turned to tin ores even though they were more difficult to obtain than arsenic-bearing ores. Smelters work outside, so fumes can be dispersed in the wind, but a smith cannot help breathing in arsenic fumes as he heats, casts, and hammers hot arsenic-laced bronze. The symptoms of low-level arsenic poisoning develop slowly, usually over a period of years. The most obvious symptoms are gradual nerve damage in the limbs. Eventually smiths must have realized what was happening to them, and what was responsible; and eventually they recognized the danger of working with arsenic alloys. Except in Egypt, where arsenic was used until 2000 BC, tin bronze gradually became the alloy of choice, and the dominant metal of advanced civilizations in the Western World for 2000 years. The long agony of so many Bronze Age smiths has come down to us in legend, however: the Greek smith god Hephaestus and his Roman counterpart Vulcan were lame. This is not an occupational hazard of the Iron Age smiths that forged spears for the Greek hoplites and swords for the Roman legionaries. It reflects the centuries-old folk memory of their predecessors.
[Source is a UC Davis professor's set of notes on historical metalurgy]

That's so dang cool. I'm wishing I could work it into the Elementary Program story about the development of copper and bronze metalworkiing, but I can't think how to get it down short enough. (Having to explain arsenic and all...)

Life, Death and Taxes

Maybe it's just the mid-April timeframe, but I found this a humorous way to open up the "invention of writing" story in the Elementary Program:

As you read about the people who lived in Çatalhöyük and Jericho, you may have wished that you knew more about what they thought and did and what stories they told each other before going to bed at night. Sadly, we will never know, because when those ancient towns were built writing had not yet been invented. People did not have any way to record their thoughts and stories for people many hundreds or thousands of years later to read.

Still, although we are glad that the ancients invented writing because it allows us to read the stories and histories that they wrote down, that is not what writing seems to have been invented for. Most of the earliest pieces of writing we have found are not stories, they are tax records.

In the growing cities of Mesopotamia and Egypt (which we will read about in a few more chapters) kings and their servants needed to keep track of who owed them grain and livestock and money. Perhaps writing began with the king's servants drawing little pictures to help them remember who had given the king how much of what, and how much was still owed. However it happened, many of the baked clay tablets that archeologists have dug up in the cities of ancient Mesopotamia are lists which simply record things like, "Two hundred baskets of wheat, three hundred baskets of barley, forty cattle, twenty camels, one hundred goats," and so on. [more...]

I know that I have a tendency to over-estimate how much you can convey to young students, so I hope that my attempt to talk about how cuneiform and heiroglyphics differed from the Pheonecian alphabet doesn't sail over kids heads...

Religion in History

One of the chief challenges in something like the Elementary Humanities Program is figuring out how to deal with religion. On the one hand, we want very much to avoid the appearance that events in Judeo-Christian history are somehow a second level truth, not worthy of being discussed in a history book. On the other hand, I really don't like the "history as providence" approach in which the author attempts to define what exactly God must be trying to do. The above-linked piece lays out our basic stance.

Starting to Look Like Something

Short on sleep, but the basics of the theme templates are up on www.humanitiesprogram.com Not so bad looking if I do say so myself.

I've also finished a rough draft of a multi-section "about" page.

Content Going Up on Main Site

It's taking a little while (and I still very much need to work on the template) but I'm getting content up on the main site.

The story lists for volumes one and two of the elementary program are up, along with the introduction and first story for volume one. I've also got a somewhat revised year one of the high school program up.

I'm also trying to fill in the basic "about" info. I've been working on an About Us page.

Hopefully I can put in some good template work tonight and have it start to look interesting, and during the course of this week get most of the basic info up so that what we'll be working on is the actual content.

New Site Online!

www.HumanitiesProgram.com is now up and running, though not much configured yet. I'll send everyone user accounts shortly.

Writeboard for Elementary Year 1 List

I've set up a writeboard for the elementary year one list, added a few things, organized a bit, and sent you all invites. Feel free to make changes and add comments.

Also, I'm told I should get the server today, though it'll take me a few days to get things set up for us to work on it.

Update:
And year 2 (which is sadly short on items. is 33-1300AD too short a time period?)

Possibly Useful Writing Collaboration Tool

Writeboard.com I tried setting up the first paragraphs of an introduction there just for kicks. You can see it here.

Approach for Vol.s 3-4 of Elementary Program

Thinking about it, I think the approach should be to have poetry and prose selections and recommendations as well as art a music recommendations for relevant periods. So for instance, the section on the British Empire might include The Charge of the Light Brigade and a selection or two from Kipling, and then recommend a number of other works related to that period.

The section on the French Revolution might include a selection or two of primary source material, and recommend Beethoven's music, various pieces of art, and fiction and non-fiction by various other authors.

The section on the American Revolution might include The Ride of Paul Revere, and include reference to age appropriate historical fiction, and primary source material.

Does that sound like it would keep the same overall balance and atmosphere as the earlier sections that would include both ancient history and pagan mythology?

added a bunch of stuff to the story list...

... for elementary school -- filling in the 18th-20th century.

I'm concerned that I've lost the story aspect of things. Certainly, a lot of this can be told in a good narrative way (and by 3rd or 4th grade the readership is more sophisticated) but I'm not sure what should be taking the place of the mythology and such.

I'm thinking it would be interesting to intersperse poetry and prose selections and also pieces of music go to listen to.

And, of course, each section would have recommended outside reading -- fiction and non fiction.

Kind of Cool Timeline Resource

HyperHistory Timeline

HS Humanities Program, Year Two

Humanities II: The Later Classical & Early Medieval World

Starr, Ancient History, Chapters 21-26
Hadas History of Rome
Plato Symposium (selections)
Euthyphro
Apology
Crito
Phaedo
Aeschulus The Persians
Sophocles Antigone
Euripedes The Bacchae
Medaea
Aristophanes Lysistrata
The Birds
Menander Dyskolos
Plautus Mostellaria (The Haunted House)
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Polybius Roman History
Cicero Letter to Atticus
1st Catalinarian
Conta Verres
Somnium Scipionis
Hadas Hist/Roman Lit (ch. 7, "Cicero")
Virgil 1st & 4th Eclogues
Aeneid (complete)
Livy History of Early Rome
Bk I, Preface - XXI, XLIX - LX
Bk II, I - XIII
Mattingly The Man in the Roman Street
Petronius “Trimalchio's Dinner” -- Satyricon
Suetonius Lives of the Caesars
St. Paul Epistles
Apuleius The Golden Ass
Bk I, II, XII, + Cupid & Psyche
Rutilius Namatianus Journey Home
Acts of the Apostles


According to the copy that I have, Year III then made it from Augustine to Boccaccio and Year IV did Machiavelli to the present.

Generally speaking it seems like things would be worked back so that Year I includes all of the Greek and Hellenistic periods; Year II covers Rome and through Charlemagne; Year III cover 800-1600 and the final year does 1600 to the present. (After all, we cheated on the length of the 1600 to present list a bit by counting stuff that we'd read anyway like Dickens and Austen and Trollope, etc.)

Re-Working Year One

Having been moving all the files from various old computers to our current one last night, I got hold of my soft copies of the Humanities Program as it existed when I went through it.

This kind of ties in with my thinking that some re-prioritization and clean-up is most needed in the first year. I seem to recall that my slowness in getting used to a heavier reading load was part of the issue, as was the fact that the program was still being written as I got started.

I did find that both History Begins at Sumer and Never to Die are still/back in print, which is nice since both had some cool selections. Another way to cut much of this short, perhaps, is to use the ancient history sourcebook which can be bought as a companion to Starr, and which contains all sorts of useful stuff from Egyptian love poems an Akhenatun's hymn to the sun to Hamurabi's code, etc. I can't find it right off on Amazon, I'd have to find my copy and see what the ISBN is.

I think something has to be done to get at least all the way through the Greeks in the first year. That probably means reducing the megaliths, making sure that the Sumerians and Egyptians don't get out of control, reading the Iliad or the Odyssey instead of both, and reducing Thucydides to selections. Thoughts?

Humanities I: The Ancient World

core text: Starr, Ancient History, Chapters 1-21

Mohen, The World of the Megaliths (selections)

Abrams, History of Art For Young People (selections)

Jansen, History of Art (selections)

BBC video, Who Built Stonehenge?

Kramer, History Begins at Sumer (ch. 1, 2, 16, 17)

----- Epic of Gilgamesh

Mayer & Prideaux, Never to Die (pp. 15-57, 63-80,101-166)

de Camp, Ancient Engineers (ch. 1-2)

Homer, Odyssey

Homer, Illiad

Herodotus, History (Persion War parts)

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War

Xenophon, The March Up Country

Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (ch. 11, 15)

Structures for the Two Programs

Just to make sure all is clear, I'm thinking that the two 'programs' would consist of as follows:

Elementary Program (very roughly grades 1-4)
- A four volume set of history and literature texts, containing literature and stories from history.
- Suggested additional readings (basically just a chronological 'good books' list. (some of these might be starred as more essential than others)
-Possibly some kind of list of suggested activities

High School Program
- A 5-15 page 'program guide' which lists what to read when, provides brief notes on each work, and perhaps offers options/tracks based on time and interest
- Suggested outside reading, art, music, movies

Tie-ins

So, in order to make the program an even richer and more life-affirming experience, I think that a good idea would be to provide lists of "tie-ins": books, movies, etc. that in some way relate to the program. These could be either serious engagements with the Great Works (Niven & Pournelle's Inferno, for instance), or simply enjoyable references to them (A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure).

Also worth assembling would be a list of good movie/TV adaptations of various works, good historical novels/movies, and good recordings of the Great Composers and period music. Obviously quite a number of these things would qualify as tie-ins.

(On a related note, there are various places online where you can find recordings of Chaucer, Beowulf, etc. This would be a great thing to have listed on the website.)

Somewhere in the program we should list some good Medieval cookbooks. Come to think of it, isn't there a Roman cookbook out there too?

And then if we wanted to, I suppose we could get into suggesting Activities For Kids, though I don't know if that would be going into too much detail.

Ideas/suggestions welcome in the comments.

Story List for Kids Humanities Program

To start with, this is pretty much just a port of the post over on DarwinCatholic on "the great stories". Contribs, please feel free to just edit this post to add bullets. Think ages 6-9 for these stories.

When the main site is up, I'll move this over as a table of contents so we can start writing the stories. (Date ranges are of course also open for negotiation -- and some unit studies or special topics collections might also be in order.)

Book One: Before Christ

Ancient Times

• What is History
• Ancient Times
• paleolithic/neolithic
• development of agriculture
• the first cities
• the bronze age
• stone henge
• something about the pyramids
• the story of King Tut
• story of Isis and Osiris
• Hathor/Sekhmet and the Nile flooding
• Akhenaten
• mummies (include afterlife, Book of the Dead, Ma'at)
• Sumer/Babylon/Ur
• [more stuff on fertile crescant civilization to balance egypt]
• Sumerian/Babylonian version of Flood Story
• 
  
• Old Testament
• Noah (as contrast with pagan version)
• Abraham & Isaac
• Exodus
• Judith
  
• Saul
• Esther
• Susannah
• Tobit
• David
• Solomon
• Sampson
• Ruth
• Maccabees
• Stories from Ancient Greece
• Prometheus
• Oedipus
• Apollo & Daphne
• Orestes
• Persephone
• Pandora
• Trojan War
• wanderings of Odysseus
• Jason and the Argonauts
• The Minotaur
• Icarus
• Orpheus
• Cupid & Psyche
• Battle of Marathon
• Battle of Thermopylae
• The Peloponessian War
• a little about Plato and Aristotle
• a little about Greek drama
• conquests of Alexander the Great
• the Gordian Knot
• Archimedes
• Empedocles (he threw himself into a volcano!)
• Stories from Ancient Rome
• Aeneas
• Romulus and Remus
• Cincinnatus
• the guy in Livy who burned his hand off
• the Brothers Gracchus
• Hannibal
• Cleopatra
• Horatius on the bridge
• Julius Caesar (must include pirate story -- kidnapped by pirates is good)
• Cleopatra
• Boadicea
• Augustus
• Nero

Book Two: 33AD to 1300

• Stories from the New Testament
• birth of Christ
• major parables and miracles
• crucifixion and resurrection
• St. Paul
• St. Stephen
• other early martyrs (Perpetua & Felicity)
• More Rome
• the 'barbarian' tribes
• Roman Britain
• Constantine
• Helena
• St. Augustine
• St. Benedict
• fall of Rome
• Attila the Hun and Pope Leo;
• 'Dark Ages' through Medieval
• King Arthur
• Beowulf
• Clovis
• Byzantium
• Mohammad & Islam
• St. Patrick & St. Brigid
• Charlemagne (must include his learning to read, his elephant)
• Celtic monasteries
• vikings (raids, exploration, myths, conversion)
• Norman conquest
• crusades
• St. Thomas Becket
• Saladin
• Eleanor of Aquitaine
• King Richard/King John
• Robin Hood
• St. Francis (should include wolf of Gubbio and preaching to Sultan) & St. Claire
• St. Dominic
• St. Thomas Aquinas;

Book Three: 1300 to 1776

• Joan of Ark
• Henry V & Agincourt (sp?)
• the 100 Years War
• Dante's Journey through the Afterlife
• Famous artists of the Renaissance
• Building of St. Peter's
• Martin Luther
• the Reformation
• the counter-Reformation
• St. Teresa of Avila (include childhood attempt at martyrdom)
  St. John of the Cross
  
• Baroque art
• Baroque music
• Henry VIII
• Thomas Moore
• Life of Shakespeare
• Stories from Shakespeare
• Queen Elizabeth
• Francis Drake
• Ferdinand & Isabella
• Columbus
• Pocahantas
• The Empires of Exploration (Spain, Portugal, France, England)
• the new age of trade (east indies, west indies)
• Ignatius Loyola & rise of Jesuits
• St. Edmund Campion
• Guy Fawkes (in socks, with bomb in box...)
• Lady Jane Grey
• Pilgrims
• Virginia & Jamestown
  
• Galileo
• Turkey and the Ottomans
• Siege of Vienna
• Siege of Malta
• Kepler
• Lepanto
  
• English Civil War
• Newton
• Opera
• Classical music
• Louis XVI
• the 30 Years War
• Salem Witch Trials
  
• the Peace of Westphalia
• The 'Glorius Revolution' and the Jacobites
• Russia under Peter the Great
• Dr. Samual Johnsn and the first English Dictionary
  
• Frederick the Great of Prussia
• Seven Years War/French and Indian War

Book Four: 1776 to Present

• The 13 Colonies
• Lives of the founders:
• George Washington
• Benjamin Franklin
• Thomas Jefferson
• John Adams
• ???
• The Declaration of Independence & Revolution
• no taxation without representation
• Boston tea party
• Paul Revere
• The shots heard round the world
• the declaration of indepence
• the revolutionary war
• a new nation
  
• the consitutional convention
• The French Revolution & Napoleon
• Louis XVI
• the 'Englightenment'
  
• The French Revolution
• The Reign of Terror
• Napoleon
• Admiral Nelson
• Duke Wellington
• the "Pax Britannica"
• Later 19th Century
• Industrial revolution
  
• Queen Victoria
• abolition in Britain
• the Irish Potato Famine
• Australia & New Zealand
• India
  
• The California gold rush
• Revolutions of 1848
• the British Empire
• Charge of the Light Brigade
• reform in Russia
• decline of the Ottoman Empire
  
• Charles Dickens
  
• The American Civil War
• slavery
• Abraham Lincoln
• Frederick Douglas
• secession
• civil war
• reconstruction
• emancipation proclamation
• Even Later 19th Century
• Meeting with the East: Trade with China and the Opening of Japan
• Trans continental railroad
• labor movement
• industrialization
• 20th Century
  
• Wright Brothers
• G.K Chesterton
• World War I
• Russian Revolution & Communism
• Laurence of Arabia and the search for Arab Freedom
  
• Irish Revolution & Independence
• the Jazz Age
• the Great Depression
• the rise of Nazism and Fascism
• Stalin
• World War II
• the Iron Curtain
• founding of the state of Israel
• communism in China
• Korean War
• anti-communism in the US
• spies in the cold war
• Vietnam War
• 
  

High School Program: Structural Questions

Okay, some high level structural questions on the High School version of the program:

1. Currently the program has the following years: 1) Pre-history through Greece 2) Rome through Charlemagne 3) 800 - 1600 4) 1600 - present. Should we keep this up, or should we tackle the prodigious task of compressing the ancient period down into a single year? On thing that strikes me as interesting is trying to get up to 33AD in the first year, and then going through 1000 in the second year.
2. Any ideas on interests areas, banding, unit studies, etc. that might help to get the supplemental/read aloud lists a bit more under control?

Waiting for Prime Time

So that Blogger will stop informing me (with an exclamation point!) that there are not posts, here one goes real quick...

A few high level goals:

• Post the high school level humanities program along with links to placed to buy the books, scheduling suggestions, explanatory notes, and eventually "tracks" based on area or interest of desired intensity. (This is to try to pull together all of the material we have to work with given that the list of assignments varried over the years, and in each incarnation the program contained a lot of things that couldn't be fit into the actual school-year schedule under "read alouds" or "supplemental".
• Work on separate suggestiong reading lists for grade 5-8 range and 1-4 range, again doing a chronological approach to Western Culture, but doing age appropriate stuff.
• Write a set of "stories through history" pieces including both history and literature aimed at the youngest years for read aloud or (past a certain age) for kids to read to themselves. I'm thinking ages 5-9. I'm thinking four volumes for ancient, medieval, 1450-1850 and 1850 to present. I could be flixible on the periods though. And hopefully Tim could be imposed upon to illustrate.

The idea is to work on developing these resources in a collaborative online environment where other people can make suggestions and potentially even submit content (though not change content without permission -- I'm not a sure about a wiki per se) but as things hit a certain level of completion make hard copy versions of things available through Lulu.

Long term, the main site would be used for developing and distributing all these resources, and the blog would be more of a free form discussion and promotion area.