GB Study

[Osmosis Mom]

How many books does your student typically do for a one year credit in great books? Also, apart from oral discussion, does your student make written responses to each book read? Ds has pinpointed 20 books he'd attempt. He is a fast reader and I was planning on adding weekly discussion and a few written assignments (but wasn;t planning on doing that for each book).

What do you think?

[FloridaLisa]

Nadia,

We've only done a GB study one year so far in the high school years and that was an American Lit/Modern history year in 9th grade. Because my older dc have been in an excellent lit tutorial for the past few years, we've not studied as many GB on our own. But this year I'm determined to go back to our own GB studies along with the lit tutorial. Since I've not been exclusivley doing GB at home, our work will look a bit different.

Okay, all these disclaimers aside (!), I think 20 books is a large undertakiing. I suppose it depends what cycle you are in, as it may be easier to read through 20 modern works than 20 ancient ones. I'm on dh's laptop and don't have access to my lists, but we probably tackled 12 works during our American lit/Modern history year. This year, I don't have my complete list, but it will be about 10 works. Again, they will also have their lit tutorial with about 8ish books, but some are quicker reads like Night.

For our GB studies, I assign certain pages per day/week and we meet together for oral discussion. Last time, we used Lighting Lit and some other writing projects. This time, I will follow more of the WTM method.

HTH,
Lisa

*Nadia, I mostly chimed in as I found it odd that your question on GB was going unanswered on this classical ed forum. :001_smile: I know there are others going through the GB (and/or very good books), who will hopefully chime in as well with a bit more experience than I have!

[Osmosis Mom]

Lisa,

Thanks for answering me. Quite frankly then I did not choose the suggested GB's by perios. I presented ds with a long list of which he chose several, we discussed his choice and then I added a few. My intention is exposure to great literature more than an in-depth study. It might be called "cheating", but I suspect it'll broaden ds's horizons and via discussions make him read the books more closely.

I went through the LL that I own and made a note next to each title if LL had assignments for it. My tentative plan is to read the books next to him so I might figure out specific suggestions for assignments as we go along. It might also be that we'll drop a book or two; we'll see.

[Kathie in VA]

In the WTM, SWB suggests about 8 books, 12 being better, and 18 for the stellar student. Other than that I can't help much as I'm planning our first GB study this year also. However if you search for Nan's words of wisdom you will find lots of posts on GB study.

[Chris in VA]

We read a lot all 3.5 years of high school. When we got to the interview for college, they wanted to know how much ds had written. Of course, he was trying for a writing-heavy major (Cinema--one partial screenplay due every week, plus a second major required).
He didn't get in.

[Chris in VA]

We read a lot all 3.5 years of high school. When we got to the interview for college, they wanted to know how much ds had written. Of course, he was trying for a writing-heavy major (Cinema--one partial screenplay due every week, plus a second major required).
He didn't get in.
I think they like reading, but they want you to do something with what you read. Read critically, and learn how to express that in writing.

[Lori D.]

We do a Great Books full credit here, in addition to classic literature done to fulfill the lit. portion of the English credit. Our 2 Great Books credits have looked like this so far:
- read aloud together / discuss together as we go
- use parts of lit. guides to give us background, discussion questions, writing assignment ideas
- do some sort of writing for each work (some are just 1 paragraph, some are 5-paragraph essays, some are multi-page papers)

On average, we manage to get through about this many works in one year:
- 6 novel-length works
- 4-6 short stories
- 1-2 plays, essays or novellas


I personally think 20 works (unless a number of them are short stories, or plays that you can WATCH, rather than read) is going to be *overwhelming*. Be aware that the Great Books are often LONG (The Iliad; Les Miserable; Don Quixote); written in language and with sentence structures that are not modern English (Faust; Jane Austen works; The Canterbury Tales), or are in a verse or epic poetry form (Beowulf, Shakespeare plays, The Aeneid). They are often dense with description (Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, William Faulkner's works), or are from very foreign cultures (the Ramayana, Things Fall Apart, Genji's Tale). And most are thick with literary elements and themes. As a result, many Great Works do not lend themselves to "overview" or "general exposure". Additionally, I would guess your student will find some of the works frustrating and/or boring if you don't take time to "unpack" them and go over them together. Also, if you are just going for exposure, I'm not sure I would count it towards a Great Books credit, as that kind of a course is really all about reading / thinking about / discussing / analyzing / comparing a handful of classic literary works.


If you're just looking for exposure, you could possibly do 20 works and call it "Survey of Classic Literature", by just reading excerpts and abridgments of the longer/more difficult works, and then just read a few of the "easier" works in their entirety and go in depth with them. I believe BJUP and other high school lit. programs go for this "survey" (excerpt) approach, rather than whole book approach. Also, I believe that the Sonlight curriculum's British Literature program covers a number of books, with not a lot of time spent on discussion, analysis or writing.

Another idea is to do a true Great Books credit, with about 8-10 of the more difficult works -- and then just enjoy some of the other "lighter" titles as summer reading for fun (or watch feature film versions that are very close to the book), without discussion or credit -- just for exposure.

If you want the specifics of what we've counted as full credit Great Books Literature elective credits for the past 2 years, just let me know. BEST of luck, whatever you decide! Warmest regards, Lori D.

[Osmosis Mom]

Hmm, OK. I'll cut the list down as the consensus seems to be Mother is too pushy (which she has a tendency to be, btw...). I'll shoot for 12 works then and pare down our list.

The list is actually -as I mentioned -a mixture of genres and periods, but that was done deliberately to make the focus more on exposing ds to what is out there. I did not mean by exposure to read excerpts...

I like the part with having to write something about each work which is why I went through my LL to see which works could be semi-covered thus. I would want im to do a context page prior to beginning each work, but am a bit at a loss about specific writing prompts. One of my weaknesses is to set a too high bar and get bogged down, trying to reach perfection. I guess that's why I subconsciously said this was for "exposure"....

OK, I sound as if I am rambling here. Actually I am looking forward to doing it with him. I have told him he'll be reading aloud parts to me as we commute to soccer and am looking forward to this focused time in the car now (instead of dreading the commute).

Anyways, thanks for the suggestions and recommendation, everyone, to pare down the number of works so we can enjoy them more.

[Osmosis Mom]

OK, here is my still too long list:

Books with LL guide that I own

Beowulf
Moby Dick
Benjamin Franklin; The Autobiography
The Gest of Robyn Hode
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Treasure Island
Leaves of Grass
The Red Badge of Courage
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Huckleberry Finn
The Call of the Wild

Books with no specific guide

Animal Farm
1984
Don Quixote
Frankenstein
Pride and Prejudice
Walden
Oliver Twist
The Lord of the Rings
Hamlet


I am actually thinking we should do these books (and perhaps a couple more) as a 2 year course. Does that seem more plausible? Add in specific writing assignments to each book. I am just thinking how should I describe the work on the transcript? I am thinking if we did this then we'd add in 2-3 regular English credits. For oldest dd we had done English 9, 10, 11, 12, but I think this time I'll give the courses specific titles on the transcript.

Brainstorming here...

[Lori D.]

Literature guides can give you a good idea of how long to spend on a work. The Progeny Press guides, for example are written to go into great depth, so that if you use the entire guide, you'll only get through 4-5 works in one year. The Windows to the World, and LLATL Gold American Lit and British Lit programs are each 1-semester long programs, as are the Lightning Lit. programs. For example, each high school Lightning Lit. guide covers 4 books, 1-2 short stories, and 1-2 poetry units for one semester -- so if you do 2 LL guides, that's a total of 8 books, 3-4 short stories, and 3-4 poetry units. Plenty of lit. for an entire year -- in fact, Hewitt Homeschooling calls doing 2 High School LL programs in one year an Honors English credit!


Another very general guide to help figure out how much literature equals a credit is by hours. Generally, anything between 120 hours to 180 hours is considered a 1 high school credit (full year course). So, if you put in about 4-5 hours a week in reading, discussing, writing, then you'll end up with 150-180 hours by the end of the school year, which would certainly equal a full credit.

I've heard the estimate that you can count on an average of about 100 pages of reading a week, which is about 20 pages a day. And often that is true. BUT, if you are reading it aloud, if you annotating, if you are discussing / analyzing, if you are going over a discussion guide, if you are doing any exercises or writing assignments... then that either increases the amount of time you'll spend on the literature per day to over an hour a day, or you'll need to slow down. So when I am trying to determine how long a work will take us, I start with a guess of 15 pages a day and then actually open up the book and read some pages in the middle to get a feel for how many words are actually printed on a page, what the language is like, how much description (slows down) or dialogue (speeds up) there is. I drop my 15-page estimate to 10-12 pages if the language is poetic or looks like it will be slow going. Conversely, we tend to cover closer to 20 pages with more modern works or if we're not going to go very deep into the work.

And again, this is our out loud literature technique. Solo reading to yourself without having to stop and annotate, discuss or write will speed things up.


As far as your literature lists, I'll just suggest a few things:
1. Don't force your student or yourself to read all of Don Quixote. No one in high school should ever be tortured so. Just do excerpts -- or, at most, do the 500+ page (half-length!!!) abridgment.
2. Realize that The Lord of the Rings is a 3-book trilogy, with each of the 3 novels pretty hefty in length. I'd suggest taking your time with this one -- spread it out over an entire semester, while perhaps dabbling with some additional shorter works (short stories, essays, poems) on the side.
3. A quick estimate of your list to me looks like you could roughly break it into thirds -- a "shorter" third would equal the literature portion of 1 English credit (along with whatever composition, grammar and vocabulary you plan on doing to include in the English credit); and the other two "longer" thirds (along with discussion/lit guides/writing assignments) could each equal 1 Great Books Literature Elective credit.

Just my opinion, for what it's worth! BEST of luck, and enjoy your Great Books journey! Warmly, Lori D.

[Osmosis Mom]

Lori,

Thanks for your input. Don Quixote is a pet-peeve of mine....I tried getting through it before and have the ambitions that ds and I can do it together.
About Lord of the Rings..Ds was ambivalent about that one (but still chose it). Perhaps I'll set it aside and look into the unit-study centered on the works for some other year.

It was very encouraging somehoe to hear that reading 15 pages a day would still make us reach the goal. I can certainly do 15 pages if reading together and discussing. He could then work on written assignments during or after the work was done.

I realise hour-wise how a credit is assigned. On a day to day basis, however, then we don't count hours and when we did dd's transcript then it was clear that for some courses the hour-count we stated was much less than her actual count. It depended on her enthusiasm...

Again, thanks, for the encouragement and for putting the course into some sort of realistic perspective. Hopefully I'll be able to report back that ds and I have bonded over the great works and are still talking....LOL!

[SS in MD]

FloridaLisa,

I read your post and was wondering what GB tutorial do you use?? I'm looking into these right now and it would be very helpful to get some advice... thanks!