Why Classical Writing and the Progymnasmata Inspire Me

...and other didactic, offensive and polemic random thoughts. (I posted this on TWTM, but wanted to put it on my blog, too, for keeping and revising.)
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I taught high school English for 5 years. I can tell you what tedium is. Reading the outlines, editing the rough drafts and evaluating the final drafts of 150 students, of whom about 4 had interesting thoughts, about 10 had something resembling content in the essay, about half of whom could construct the essay using correct grammar, about four fifths of whom could follow the structural formula. About 10% of the papers made me wonder who had been plagiarized. But about 70% of these students went on to college, so I know the essays were "acceptable"--to the colleges. They made me feel like nails were going through my head. They were all the same in structure and almost identical in thought depth and process. I can't do the modern writing thing again.

The progym is hard. It can be tedious. But my hope is that the result of the work will not be the production (by my son or by me, as we are both learning) of further tedium.

Another reason I am using the progym and the follow on study of rhetoric is that it is opening my understanding of the writings of those who were classically educated--pretty much all the ancients, St. Paul, the church fathers, the lasting medievalists, the philosophers, and the founding fathers of America, including those who hashed it all out in the war that took place in 1860s. They understood, wrote and argued in these styles, and understanding these styles have opened up these previously tedious documents to my understanding. It is with new eyes that I read them. These documents were never mysteries to my grandparents, or to my parents. So there must have been something that they had that I don't and I want it. Educated people had it until a few decades ago, and it seems like a giant loss to me.

I am not at all confident that I can "do it all"--there is so much lacking. But I'm not going down without trying to understand what Western Civilization has revered for thousands of years...I don't feel up to it as re: credentials to throw out what has been honored by those wiser than myself for longer than I or my son or his children yet to come will live.

I need to be inspired if I'm going to keep at this homeschool stuff, and thinking that my son's high school essays will be the image of those I graded--roughly 20,000 essays, I think, is more than I can bear.

To cut to the chase, take a look at this website: http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/. THIS is why I want to learn and then teach the progym and then rhetoric, in a nutshell.