Why We Read Hard Books The Ambrose School

An Ambrose Parent Education article by Chris Browne, 7th & 11th Grade Humanities Teacher I recently finished reading Dante’s The Divine Comedy with my junior students and Homer’s The Odyssey with my seventh grade students. You will not find either on the reading lists of many high schools around the country, as both have been deemed too difficult, inaccessible, or antiquated for young readers. If the rest of the world has given up on these books and others like them, then why haven’t classical Christian schools like ours? Wouldn’t we be better off assigning our students reading that was less difficult, easier to digest, and frankly, more enjoyable? There are great answers to those questions!

In a roundabout way, an article published in the The Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago gets at some of those answers. The article cites a tech company’s analysis of what kind of books kids enjoy reading. Not surprisingly, ninjas and dinosaurs are high on the list, while ethical philosophy and Trinitarian theology didn’t make the cut. The basic concern of the tech company involved is that they publish the kind of books that kids want to read. Though the article is specifically about what algorithms say kids enjoy reading, the underlying questions it raises apply to our student reading lists. Should we be primarily concerned with giving students what they want?

As Dr. Mohler, the President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminar and Boyce College put it regarding the results of the study, “if we just give children what the algorithms say they want, they’re going to... Our job as parents and teachers is not to give our students what they want, but to give them what they need; not to give them what they enjoy, but to give them what... We do not read The Aeneid with students because they are entertained by it or they want it; we read it with them so they might see the beauty in it and be transformed... It is true that through careful cultivation by parents, teachers, pastors, and friends that many students will come to love the books we read, the conversations we have, and the liberal arts we study. By “love” I do not mean they will necessarily have some warm sentiment towards The Aeneid or the other books we read; that may or may not happen.

By “love” in this context I mean something greater: we hope our students will come to have a deep and abiding respect and appreciation for the true, good, and beautiful things we expose them... This respect and appreciation can exist independent of any feeling our students might have about the things they encounter during their education. In our modern era of instant information and bite-sized entertainment, reading intellectually challenging material can seem like an unnecessary burden. Why struggle through a dense classic novel, a difficult philosophical treatise, or an intricate historical account when easier, more accessible options are available? However, those who embrace the challenge of “hard books” often find their intellectual lives enriched in ways that lighter reading simply cannot provide. In the context of classical education, where the cultivation of wisdom and virtue is paramount, reading hard books is not just beneficial — it is essential.

Reading a difficult text requires patience, focus, and perseverance. When a book is challenging, the reader cannot simply coast through it in a passive way. Instead, he or she must engage actively, rereading passages, looking up words, and considering complex ideas. This process strengthens the mind much like physical exercise strengthens the body. In an age where attention spans are shrinking, the discipline developed through reading demanding works is invaluable. A student who has struggled through The Republic by Plato, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, or The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer will develop the ability to sustain deep thought.

This intellectual stamina prepares individuals for rigorous study in any discipline, whether in law, medicine, theology, or philosophy. Even more importantly, it enables them to engage with the weighty questions of life with clarity and insight. Many of the greatest works of literature, philosophy, and theology do not provide easy answers. Instead, they invite the reader into a serious intellectual and moral struggle. Consider Augustine’s Confessions, where the author wrestles with questions of sin, grace, and divine providence. Or regard Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which raises profound questions about justice, revenge, and the meaning of existence.

These works challenge us not just to understand but to engage, to debate, and to form our own reasoned conclusions. By reading hard books, we learn that truth is not always simple. Life’s most significant questions — What is justice? What is virtue? What is the good life? — are not easily answered.

Grappling with these texts prepares us for the complexity of real-world ethical and philosophical dilemmas. In middle school and high school, your teachers probably encouraged you to seek out primary sources, which are original accounts of a topic, as opposed to secondary sources, which are retellings or summaries of... However, teachers often don’t acknowledge an important fact: Primary sources are really boring and hard to read. If they’re historical texts, they’ll have different writing conventions, which makes them much harder to parse. Or, if they’re from the present but are academic, they’ll use language that is uncommon outside of their field. Reading a modern account that summarizes the topic, such as a Wikipedia article, can help you understand a concept much more quickly than you would’ve by reading primary sources.

With the advent of the internet, summaries have proliferated. It used to be that if you wanted to learn something, and your professor’s curriculum wasn’t working for you, the best way to learn was to go to the library and find a book... But now we live in a more advanced world where challenging subjects have been summarized and popularized in YouTube videos and Wikipedia articles. Learning class material via YouTube isn’t bad by itself—I’ve certainly saved many hours by watching videos by The Efficient Engineer instead of reading my textbooks—but using YouTube as your professor won’t work forever for... First, as you continue to learn from the internet, you’re bound to notice diminishing returns. For example, there must be hundreds of thousands of videos, articles and websites out there that explain how to multiply and divide fractions or factor polynomials.

Once you get higher up into mathematics and have to deal with concepts such as derivatives and Laplace transforms, though, things get trickier. There’s still information out there, but it gets much harder to find resources that will explain it better than the textbook you paid an extortionate amount of money for. Eventually, once you reach math concepts that I’m not educated enough to know the names of, you will have to accept the sad truth that not all knowledge is free and easy to find... Some of it can only be gained from an expert in the field, which is why becoming a part of an academic community is useful. But, much more often, it’ll exist in a textbook or journal, completely unsummarized. If, up to that point, you’ve been avoiding textbooks like the plague, what happens then?

Second, a person who relies on summaries can be abused by them. The act of summarizing itself involves making value judgments about what parts of a text are important, and the person making that video may not even be aware of the judgments they made. More importantly, there’s active disinformation: Someone could simply lie about what’s in the text that they’re summarizing. How would you know that they’re wrong? This risk of misinformation isn’t just unique to us college students, though. Most people get their facts and opinions not from primary sources, but from news outlets or commentators that do the research for them.

Obviously, if you relied solely on primary sources at all times, you’d spend all your time doing research and never come to any conclusion. But being a responsible agent of knowledge means that when your brain tells you that something doesn’t seem right, you have to do the research the hard way. Still, being good at reading complex works is important in other ways. Being able to parse legal documents, tax forms or contracts can help you catch important points that you otherwise would’ve missed. Katie Azevedo July 31, 2023good habits, reading comprehension, study skills If you’re a student of any age, you’re going to read hard books for school.

This is a fact of life. But whether you consider yourself a good reader or not, reading hard books will always take more effort and sometimes different approaches than reading other types of books. In this post, I teach you how to read hard books with 7 strategies. The strategies below will help you get through difficult novels, including non-fiction, fiction, and biographies. Priming is a strategy that involves getting a brief overview of the topic you’ll be reading about before you read it, so that what you read has a place to “stick” in your mind. Why is this important?

Because the more you know about a subject, the better you’ll be able to process and understand new information about that subject. Think of it this way: If you’ve eaten an orange before, you’ll have an easier time describing the flavor of a grapefruit the first time you eat a grapefruit. Understanding the orange’s flavor (sweet, tart, citrus-y) helps you categorize and experience the flavor of a grapefruit. Classical Academic Press has partnered with The Ambrose School of Boise, Idaho, to provide you with this valuable resource that can be used and adapted for schools, co-ops, and homeschools. The Ambrose Curriculum Guide represents the fruit of more than 10 years of planning, teaching, assessment, collaboration, writing, revising, and rewriting. There is no other guide that we know of that contains such ongoing thought, clarity, detail, and accumulated wisdom.

With 262 total documents for grades K–12, this guide is a remarkable help to any teacher or administrator as you engage in curriculum decisions and lesson planning. The Ambrose Curriculum Guide is composed of a variety of documents that cover every grade and subject and includes a curriculum roadmap, course lead sheets, course scope and sequences, rubrics, and 132 separate literature... Divided into two major parts, Lower School and Upper School, this ultimate resource of suggested texts, teaching goals and methods, suggested schedules, and more will give you an incredible head start as you prepare... You can use the Ambrose Curriculum Guide as a tool to plan a start-up school, to provide guidelines for a co-op, to design a grade level for a homeschool student, and much more. This versatile guide can meet the needs of any educator! View an overview of the Ambrose Curriculum Guide in the tabs above, or explore the documents below.

In the K–6 grade range, documents have been grouped by grade, with the exception of music, art, speech, and physical education, which have been grouped by subject. In the 7–12 grade range, documents have been arranged by subject. Note that within the 7–12 Letters folder, the documents have been further sorted by grade, as documents specific to each text studied in each grade are provided. Please note that these documents are read-only files with a ClassicalU subscription. You also may purchase downloadable versions here from Classical Academic Press. CAP Audio Room: Interview with Dr.

Christopher Perrin on curriculum guides and planning August 8, 2019 | yalepress | African American Studies, American History, Ancient History, Literature Reading is like Alice running after that white rabbit, because she is curious; she wants to know more about a talking rabbit. She is prepared to take the risk and jump down that hole without knowing what she will find at the bottom of the well. This is why we read: because of our passion for the unknown, the unexpected, the other, and, yes, at times, the uncomfortable. Alice finds many amazing things in Wonderland, but she is also disturbed because they are strange and don’t fit her expectations.

People Also Search

• Why We Read Hard Books - The Ambrose School
• Why It's Important to Read Hard Books: The Case for Intellectual ...
• Why reading hard books is important, despite how difficult it can be
• How to read hard books: 7 strategies for difficult text
• Ambrose Curriculum Guide - ClassicalU
• Why We Read - Yale University Press
• Why Do We Read Hard Books? - Mars Hill Academy
• Why You Should Read Hard Books - The Read Well Podcast
• The Art of Reading Hard Books - Sam Matla
• ACADEMICS - The Ambrose School