It is hard to believe that it is September already, with Uvas
Creek still flowing fast through Silva’s Crossing. But a few leaves
on the apricot and the mulberry have turned yellow and fallen, and
Anne’s classes at Gavilan have begun, and we are, nominally,
not-back-to-school.
It is hard to believe that it is September already, with Uvas Creek still flowing fast through Silva’s Crossing. But a few leaves on the apricot and the mulberry have turned yellow and fallen, and Anne’s classes at Gavilan have begun, and we are, nominally, not-back-to-school.
To be sure, at 16, her education hardly qualifies as homeschooling any more. She is taking chemistry and calculus at Gavilan, and world literature and composition from my friend with the master’s in linguistics. The only thing she is studying at home with me is history. Horses occupy her every spare millisecond.
I am only teaching three math classes to homeschoolers out of my home this year: Algebra I, Algebra II, and Trig, all on Wednesday, with four days of homework assigned to be completed under the vigilant eyes of their mothers.
So, fearing lest I might have some free time on my hands, I applied to teach math in South San Jose at Live Oak Academy, a large Christian classical homeschool co-op which is in the process of transforming itself into a small accredited private Christian classical school. I teach Algebra I, pre-algebra, and fourth-grade biology there.
I should explain what a classical school is. It means they teach the trivium: grammar, dialectic and rhetoric. In modern parlance, they teach Latin and debate, in addition to the several branches as required by state law. For the seminal essay on the classical method, the interested reader can find Dorothy Sayers’s “The Lost Tools of Learning” on the Internet.
Live Oak Academy has already fielded some nationally recognized debate teams: no mean feat, seeing as their student body finally topped 100 this fall.
My first day of teaching passed in a blur: commuting, finding my classrooms, passing out green sheets, learning students’ names, and oh, yes, teaching.
My students were uniformly nice. Some were tall and some were short; some were quiet and some were noisy; some were white, some Asian, some Hispanic. I noticed nothing extraordinary about them… not the first day.
On my second day of teaching, I began by quizzing my fourth grade biology students on what we had learned the previous day. They remembered it all: definition and etymology of biology and six characteristics of living things.
So I launched into the story of Carolus Linnaeus, born 1707. They enjoyed hearing about how he was called the little botanist when he was just their age, and about his work as a biologist, his development of taxonomy, his contributions to scientific nomenclature and his seven children.
Then we did a little taxonomy demonstration of our own, which segued rather nicely into a discussion of the five kingdoms of life. I made it through an explanation and elaboration of Animalia and Plantae, and had just written fungi on the board when I turned around to a room of intent eyes and waving hands.
“HOW did you pronounce that?” they wanted to know.
“Fun-jee?” I reiterated, falteringly.
Sheridan told me, very politely, “WE learn Latin in the classical tradition, and in the classical tradition it should be pronounced Fun-ghee.”
And Anna reported, with utmost civility, “And WE learn Latin in the church tradition, so WE pronounce it Fun-Guy.”
And Alex said, “I have a joke. Why does everyone want to play with the mushroom?”
“Why?” we asked.
“Because he is a fun guy!”
So I declared the pronunciation of Fungi to be a research question, and wrote it on the board in the special area reserved for questions that the teacher does not know the answer to, any one of which can be researched by the student at home for a point of extra credit. Then we discussed Protista and Monera.
Then we had a fun time cutting out pictures of living things from old World magazines until it was time for them to go to choir. But I must confess, it was quite a shock to find myself embroiled in a discussion about the comparative pronunciations of the classical and church traditions of Latin with a bunch of 9-year-olds.
