One of the great things about home educating your children is you get a chance to educate (or re-educate) yourself. One book I return to time and again is The Well-Educated Mind (TWEM) by Susan Wise Bauer. The subtitle of the book is "A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had." In it, Bauer outlines a program for reading the classics or "Great Books", and provides helpful book summaries and notes on how to approach different literary genres.
Each year, in an effort to become familiar with the literature of the time period the kids will be studying, I follow the high school suggestions in The Well-Trained Mind (TWTM), a home education book also by Bauer. Some years are lighter than others for me, according to our life circumstances (new baby, moving, heavy sports schedules, etc.). Last year was light for me, but this year I think I have the determination to embark again on more serious study in preparation for Julia's high school years.
Thus, I have taken on the study of Don Quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes and translated by Edith Grossman. I could have used the translation by Thomas Shelton in my treasured copy from the Harvard Classics, but I felt the somewhat antiquated language might be troublesome for Julia when comes her turn to read the novel. And while The Well-Educated Mind gives several suggestions for translations to read, after some perusal at Amazon, using the "look inside" feature, I settled on the above translation (which was not suggested in TWEM).
TWTM suggests that students put the Great Books in historical context by reading about the time period in Spielvogel's Western Civilization and then looking up the dates that span the author's lifetime in The Timetables of History and noting significant events and contemporaries. Surprisingly, the latter book is one I purchased on a whim when I was still in college. I'm glad I decided to hold onto this resource! Once the student has the context, he then goes on to TWEM to read about the genre. In this case, I read about the novel (there is a considerable portion devoted to the history of the novel), and then I moved onto the short summary of Don Quixote.
One of the exercises for reading is to briefly summarize each chapter. The reason for this is so when you go back for a deeper examination of certain parts of the novel, your memory is refreshed. So, I have a notebook that I keep for these notes, as well as the historical context notes. It's kind of nice to look back and see the notes I made for Homer and some related Greek drama (there is a blog post about that somewhere, but I can't locate it right now). What I really like about Don Quixote right now is the brevity of the chapters. It makes tackling this novel more manageable for me!
One resource I haven't referred to for myself yet is Spark Notes. This online study guide is similar to the old familiar yellow and black Cliffs Notes, a resource I actually never used in high school or college (maybe I should have???). I think the study guide will be helpful, especially when I'm looking for essay ideas for Julia.
The image above is Pablo Picasso's Don Quixote.
