Best laid plans sometimes end up getting eaten by the dog. I knew as soon as I posted our plans, something would change. It did, not drastically, but changes on path for the remaining years. This time it's history. We're going to spend three semesters on U.S. history. It will end up more like U.S. through a world history view.
Why three semesters?
Z has been interested in studying the WWII era for a long time. He used to watch the military channel for hours. We have a lot of books on WWII, a lot of areas he wants to study. A lot of movies I remember studying in high school.So we're going to spend our time in this fashion:
- semester 1: Civil War up to WWI
- semester 2: WWI through WWII
- semester 3: post WWII to modern day
I'm actually looking forward to this course and I have a loose outline of how it's going to work. I started pulling resources off my shelf, and realized I have most of what I need already. Amazing how plans fall into place like that.
But what about the Romans?
Because Z wants to study about "wars with guns", we are going to modify a few of our history plans for this year and add a study on the Romans and Middle Ages into the last few months. Again, I have enough resources on my shelf to make it work. While we'll do a quick tour of history, we will touch on more topics from the era down the road. Some of the Romans will come up in our ethics class next year. We'll spend time pondering the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. We'll also touch on the Middle Ages in a later philosophy class. I'm pondering how to frame it all, but I have a lecture series on philosophy of the Middle Ages. Z also wants to read Dante's entire commedia, which we won't attempt without a nice study guide. I also have this fascinating book called The History of Hell, those three resources would make a nice class. I can already imagine the discussions.
