Advice on teaching Great Books-Year 1

[anissarobert]

Hello,

Has anyone taught a Great Books class on Ancient Literature, as laid out in the WTM? I am planning to teach Great Books for the first time this year, and I have recruited a few students to join my dd and I for a class. I am finalizing the syllabus to send to the other students, and I have a couple of questions for those who have been down this path before me.

Are there any great books that should be dropped?

Were you able to cover all or most of them?

Which were the most popular?

Did you have your students study How to Read A Book?

Do you have any general advice?

(I have a degree in Philosophy and I still see this list as a challenge!)

Thank you so much for your help. :)

[Michelle in AL]

I am teaching this too this yr, so take my advice with someone who hasn't yet done this.
One book you may want to drop is 12 Caesars due to some explicit scenes.
I myself read How to Read a Book and plan to summarize it and reinforce it in my class. A book I liked better was How to Read a Book Like a Professor. Its great to correlate with ancient literature. Chapters like "Every trip is a quest" go well with the Epic of Gilgamesh, Exodus and The Odyssey.
"Nice to eat with you" goes well with the Odyssey. There's also a chapter called "Its Greek to me."
Here's a link to some great socratic questions that someone posted here:
www.taliessin.org/Revised_Analysis_Sheets.doc
HTH some,

[Jane in NC]

My recommendations may not be applicable since I was working with one student--not a group. Regarding the reading list: I found that some things "clicked" and others did not. In the case of the latter, my son read excerpts, Herodotus, for example.

Huge successes were The Frogs and The Republic. A less apparent success in my son's eyes but one that I am glad we covered in detail was The Aeneid. I never realized how this is such a seminal work in the western canon. References to The Aeneid continue in the middle ages with Inferno for example. We listened to Elizabeth Vandiver's Aeneid lectures from the Teaching Company.

We did skip The Iliad and Odyssey because my son had already read them, several times in the case of The Iliad.

The WTM list is extensive and I think that it is hard to pick and choose. I am glad that my son read The War of the Jews, for example, but this is not always a selected work from the time period. Because my son also studies Latin, I knew that there were things that he would encounter later. This coming year (11th grade) he is studying Catullus, Ovid and Cicero. In 9th, I assigned a biography of Cicero--not the suggested work on the WTM list.

The thing that you will truly have fun with is The Republic. Teens seem to respond to this book. I would have the group begin reading it aloud.

Choose your Gilgamesh carefully--warn parents if necessary.

Other Teaching Company series are terrific. You may want to consider them as well. My son loved the series on Great Battles of the Ancient World.

Best regards,
Jane

[anissarobert]

Thank you both for all your help.

Michelle- thank you for the recommendation of How to Read Literature like a Professor. It is the second time I've seen it here. Now I have to buy it!:)

Jane-I agree with your ideas. The Frogs and The Republic are on the list for sure. It is so hard to narrow down this list, but I know we can't cover all 23 recommended titles in the 36 or so weeks we have.

Do you have a favorite translation of Gilgamesh? I looked at the two I have today, and I'm not sure I want to use either of them. One is an old college text with too many footnotes and explicit language. (I compared the scene toward the beginning with the still wild man and the woman of questionable morals, as it was one that had stuck in my mind.) The other is the one listed by SWB in TWTM. It is by Ferry. This seemed better, but it is a retelling rather than a translation, and that bothers me some.

If you or anyone else have a suggestion. I would love one!

[Nan in Mass]

I'm not sure my advice would be much use. You can look for past posts by me (Nan in Mass). In some of them, I explain how I applied TWEM/TWTM great books to my particular children. I can tell you that my son thought Spielvogel's Western Civ. was good for the background history. I used the recommended editions and found the notes to be about right - not so many that they interrupted our reading too much, but enough so that we got more of the references than we would have on our own. I also used the introductions of the books for background info like info about the author. I skimmed it first and picked which bits to read aloud to my sons. The other thing I did was have my older one look at Wikipaedia and tell me why this book is on the great books list. Usually, Wiki tells you in the first paragraph. They kept a timeline and a map, also. I wrote out the questions from TWEM for each stage for some types of books, so that it was easier to go through them after we'd finished reading the book. I think it is very good that you gathered more students to go through the books with your own. It will be slower that way, but your discussions will be vastly improved GRIN. I included my youngest, who was still in middle school, because it turned out that three made a much better discussion. It will be even better if you have students from outside the family. I have two other pieces of advice. It seems to me that some of the people who have tried and given up, or who haven't had the confidence to try in the first place, have failed because they were too worried about missing something important when reading the books, something that the "experts" say that they should learn. I think they lacked confidence in the books themselves to carry their message. My advice is to try to remember that for years, these books were read ALL BY THEMSELVES. They didn't come with lectures on history, the author, or how this book fit into the grand sweep of history and philosophy. And STILL they were considered important, life-altering works. Yes, one work refers to the others because the authors had often read the same great works, but you, too, will be reading the works and recognize enough of the references, especially if you read them in chronological order. The notes will help with any historical/vocabulary references, like the difference between a friar and a monk. You can also tell yourself that everyone gets something different out of these books, anyway. It is like looking at a picture - the reason I love it might be entirely different from the reason you love it, but what matters is that it is important for both of us. When you and your students read something like The Republic, there will be useful information in it for each of you, and it is bound to be different because your ages and lives and goals are different. I think it is a mistake to try to make all your students come out of a book with the same thing. If you relax a bit and wait and see what your students notice and discuss on their own, they will make the book into something that will be more meaningful to them. You can't control what they remember and what they don't, anyway. If they've been left some space to wonder about this and argue about that, they will remember better. Besides, it is great fun when a student suddenly says, "This character is exactly like Warf in Star Trek." So my advice is to remember the goal of The Well Trained Mind, which is to teach your students how to read a book so they can continue to do it for the rest of their lives, not to gain a specific set of facts about one particular book. If you miss something with this book, or get something wrong about that book (whatever "wrong" is), it doesn't really matter. What matters is that you give your students a general method of reading a more difficult work and making it meaningful to themselves. For this purpose, the more general set of questions in TWEM work MUCH better than a specific set of questions written for a specific book would. Because the questions are general, the students eventually begin to remember them and apply them to everything on their own. We've been doing TWEM for several years now, in our own rather lacksidaisilcal way, and it has profoundly changed the way my children process information GRIN. They actively process what they watch and read now, instead of passively taking it in. We watched a silly hollywood movie a few nights ago, and when we got finished with it, my sons proceeded to discuss what made the movie work. It wasn't a long discussion, but they talked about why this part had to be included, and why they needed this character, and why that character had to act this way instead of that way, and what type of humour was involved, and why they liked it. I was half asleep and didn't particularly want to dissect my evening's entertainment, so I didn't say a word; it all took place between my 14yo and my 18yo. And this happens with everything, now! So even a little bit of TWEM/TWTM goes a long way. I never did all the recommended steps with any one book. We always skip things. We read the books aloud together. We've only picked out the books I thought would appeal to my sons the most and skipped the rest. We don't cover very much during each year because everything takes a long time if you are reading aloud and discussing as you go along. I knew almost nothing about literature, history, and philosophy when we began. AND IT STILL WORKED. So just do it. And try not to worry about what you are missing. And move on if something doesn't seem to be working. And don't spend a ton of time and energy trying to prep for each book because the books speak for themselves (especially if they have an intro and notes LOL) very nicely. Have fun!
-Nan

[anissarobert]

Nan,

Thank you for your advice. I know that I usually will try to do too many books and that won't work in a group setting. You're right that I have to let the students interact with the books. I was just thinking about that last night while I was rereading How to Read a Book. I have to remember to think like Socrates and guide their discussion, not lecture. I'm excited to read many of these books again, because I have not touched most of these authors since college. Hopefully some of my enthusiasm will rub off on the students.:)

What lucky children we have. It is an honor to be able to participate in the "Great Conversation", and learn to educate yourself through reading.

Thanks again, I knew I wasn't the only one trying to do this on my own. It is so nice to have those in the hive mind who have gone down this path before.

Anissa