Teacher of the Year! Ha.

Last week I looked through The Well Trained Mind list of Great Books for 10th grade. Check...check...check...
Emma has had a very full year reading books.

Maybe we can fit in one more book from this list before we break for summer, I think to myself.

The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser.
That sounds nice.

I think I have seen a children's version of that book illustrated by Mary Englbreit.
But I also seem to think it is a challenging book. No idea why I think this...but it is in my head. Well I'll just order it from the library along with the Cliff notes.

Monday arrives along with it the Cilff notes for The Faerie Queen.
I ask Emma to start reading the Cilff notes so she has an idea what the book will be about.

Saturday I run to the library to pick up another arm full of interlibrary loan books. The librarian plops down four books. Three sweet little books by Thornton Burgess for Katie and a big fat paperback of the Faerie Queen.

Oh my goodness, I say to the librarian, this is much too big. (It has over 1200 pages.) You can return it.

A book like that would take the whole summer to read. Yikes! Perhaps another time...with a teacher who knows what she is doing.

Emma will finish reading the Cliff Notes anyway.

Ah...life is full of surprises.

Here is a list of the books that Emma did read for her Great Books class.

Acts-Ephesians- The Bible
Confessions -Augustine
Beowulf
Life on a Medieval Barony-Davis
The Magna Carta-Daughtery
The Inferno- Dante
Gawain and the Green Knight
The Prince- Machiavelli
The Protestant Reformation with original writing by Erasmus, Luther, Calvin etc.
Utopia-More
Commentary on the Galatians-Luther
Julius Caesar-Shakespeare

So she isn't reading The Faerie Queene...
Another time perhaps.

Did you read those books in High School? I certainly didn't.
I was reading The Seventeenth Summer and watching Gilligan's Island!

Encourage one another,
Donna