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Victoria's avatar

"I needed to assimilate the tradition and take some measure of the greatest works of the past before I really had any sense of what a novel or epic poem or some other masterwork was really all about."

Call me crazy (or homeschooled) but isn’t that how humanities classes are supposed to or used to work?

My older sister and I took a humanities class together in high school (again, homeschooled). We discovered that we absorbed the material much better if we read it aloud, so we read it ALL aloud together. The Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid. Gilgamesh. Shakespeare. Dante. Milton. It was an amazing experience, and it actually took less time than reading it silently alone, because we never found ourselves glazing over and reading the same sentence again and again or any of the other things that happen when you try to read something too difficult. I recommend it to everyone.

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Sandhya, writer & musician's avatar

Ted, you may be unique in the thoroughgoing organization of your reading time throughout decades, but in terms of yearning for genuine wisdom from a young age, you were never alone.

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