Saturday, January 19, 2008

Teaching Orthodoxy

Our Frequent Reader and Friend of the ACS Blog with the interesting name Enbrethiliel says she is going to teach Orthodoxy.

I am intrigued. What grade level teacher are you and who are these lucky students? How does a teacher prepare her students for the firestorm that is Chesterton?

2 comments:

  1. I recommend help from beer and cigars.

    ReplyDelete
  2. +JMJ+

    Hi, Nancy! =)

    I teach high school seniors, who have actually been hearing all about Chesterton since the start of the school year. (Every new unit opens with a Chesterton Quote of the Day--as relevant to the lesson as I can make it. For instance, when we studied colour idioms, I used his famous "White is a colour . . ." passage from A Piece of Chalk.)

    As I've written on my own 'blog, the assigned text for the next few weeks is (unfortunately) George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the most anti-Chesterton novel ever written. =P There are at least two recognisible rebuttals to statements from Orthodoxy, as well as allusions to The Man Who Was Thursday (and I suspect, Manalive! as well).

    When we were taking Inferno last year, we played "Virgil's Advocates," letting "human reason" give us arguments against sins which have become more acceptable to modern readers (cf Circle II and Circle VII, Round 3). We may do something similar for Nineteen Eighty-Four (I'm just not yet sure what!) to deal with Orwell's attacks on orthodoxy.

    ReplyDelete

Join our FaceBook fan page today!