Veni, vidi, vici - I came, I saw, I conquered (Julius Caeser)

I remember it as clear as day. As plain as the nose on my face. The day I decided to homeschool and how my educational philosophy for homeschooling came about. I was visiting my girlfriend L and she was telling me about how she was pulling her daughter out of kindergarten and was going to homeschool her. Now, when I was growing up, homeschooling was synonymous with "geek"! Really. Because the only people I knew who were homeschooled were pretty geeky. Anyhow, L was pretty frustrated with the system and knew she could do a better job herself, so that was that. S was going to be homeschooled. And then L showed me this book. I read the first couple paragraphs standing there in her living room and then went and bought it myself. And the rest is history. We became a Classical Homeschooling Family. Well, I guess technically, they call us Neo-Classical, but whatever. Anyhow, part of a good Classical education is learning Latin and this year Bubba started learning Latin. I started him on this curriculum, which is DVD based because I didn't know a stitch of Latin and knew I couldn't teach it. But, I decided I wanted to learn it, too, so when Bubba does Latin, Mommy does Latin, too. But, what is the point of learning Latin? I mean, we're in the 21st century for goodness sake. Rome fell in 476 AD when the last Roman emperor fell to the barbarians. But, there are 21st century reasons to learn Latin. One of them is.... it trains the mind to think. A Classical education isn't just the acquisition of knowledge, but rather a training of the mind. Remember when you were taking algebra and you kept asking your teacher and your parents and anyone else who would listen, "Why do I have to learn this? How is this going to help me in the real world?" And nobody had a real good answer? Remember that? Well, I may not do algebraic equations on a daily basis (or even on a yearly basis, for that matter) but learning algebra (and I cannot believe I'm saying this because I hated math) trains the mind, which is something that is useful and essential in the real world. If you don't have a mind that is trained to think, reason and understand then you become just one of the mindless dolts that believe everything that is said because they don't have the capability to think logically and rationally. So, all that to say, Latin helps train the mind. Now, that is a high and lofty aspiration and it's something that happens over time. However, there is another reason to learn Latin, which does help answer that question, "How will this help me in the real world?". That reason is that it really helps you understand English. When I was in high school (can you find me in this picture?) we had an English teacher who taught us prefixes, suffixes and root words (all Latin, though I didn't know it) all year long. We hated it. (Here's another picture, can you find me?) But, I did remember a lot of them over the years and they do help a lot. When you see a word and remember that the prefix "sub" means "under" you can figure out what a word means. Or at least mostly what it means. Today, in Bubba's Latin lesson we learned all these Latin prepositions "inter" which means "between (think interrupt), "sub" which means "under" (think subway), "ex" which means "out of" (think exit). That kind of got me excited because... really, training a child's mind is good and important, but they don't really care about that at this point in their education. They do get excited when they can figure out what a word means because they know it's a Latin derivative.