Teach Classical Poetry & Short Stories: American Literature (Memoria Press) {Review}

Memoria Press is continuing to impress with their new releases and I am ever plotting and planning what we will work on next in our little Memoria Scholé Academy. The other day, I started to tell you about how much we are enjoying working through Poetry for the Grammar Stage with my oldest daughter. Today, I am excited to tell you about my own experiences trekking through Poetry & Short Stories: American Literature 19th and 20th Centuries by David M. Wright. This set of materials is designed for use with any students from 7th-12th Grades. As an adult continuing education in a Classical Christian Education realm, I am really enjoying discovering such materials and planning for my own students’ futures.

Getting these guides in-hand with the Teacher Manual and Student Guide, the first thing that came to mind was that these are the thickest guides I have experienced yet from Memoria Press and I couldn’t wait to dig in. You just have to love the learning that this mama receives when it is still in the open introductory essays and I am pulling up a dictionary to look up an unfamiliar word…

When I was in early high school, as a student in the International Baccalaureate program, I can recall feeling hesitant to dissect and annotate poetry. As a poet myself, it made my skin crawl to consider people trying to dictate what a poet was trying to relate to their audience. In this program, what I love is that straight from the beginning, the guide tells the student that we are seeking the soul, essence, or central one idea. This doesn’t grind against me. This is a concept that I can see as being open to interpretation and even changing for when a reader reads as to what it could mean to them again.

This year, my students are venturing out of the Ancient History eras and into an Introduction to American History through a wealth of resources (including Memoria Press States & Capitals, Simply Classical American History set which overlaps with our Third Grade American History and Fourth Grade American History Discussions for Supplemental Reading, ABC Book of Early Americana, and Stories of Great Americans for Little Americans. It is the perfect time for me, as a life-long learner to jump back in to further my own Classical Christian Education, specifically in American Literature and Poetry. This Memoria Press Poetry & Short Stories Set is exactly what I need.

Samples of the Text, Teacher Guide, and Student Guide are available on Memoria Press' website. This pleasingly thick anthology provides a hearty but painstakingly curated selection of American Poetry and Short Story Fiction from the early 19th century to part of the 20th century. The Study Guide and Teacher Guide ensure a thorough mastery and "poetry appreciation" for these classic works such as Rip Van Winkle, Sleepy Hollow, and more...

Teach Classical

For the purposes of this review, and with my experience using Memoria Press products the first thing I did was purchase a digital set of the Poetry & Short Stories: American Literature Lesson Plans directly from Memoria Press and then I jumped right in. Wait, I? Yes, indeed! I was the student for this review, as my own students are not quite to this age and level yet (my oldest is working through the fourth-grade materials) and I have found that time and again that Memoria Press programs are excellent for the continuing education adult desiring a Classical Education.

By the blessing of the Homeschool Review Crew, I received the set including Teacher Guide, Student Guide, and Text, or rather Poetry Anthology for the American Literature materials. The Student Guide is consumable, but in the way the program is written, the Anthology is also intended to be consumable as students are encouraged to annotate and take notes right within the pages of the text.

As I plan to have several students along the line come up and use this material I was surprised and reached out to the ever-helpful Memoria Press Forum for advice. I was encouraged by veteran teacher mamas and the curriculum director herself that it is ideal if you can afford a text for each child to use that as a consumable also. “The idea of marking the text is something that is cultivated through middle and high school so as to become a habit.” Yet, at the same time, I was encouraged that if one text is really what we have that we could implement a note-taking system to keep track of what we wanted to highlight and note.

In the end, the way that I made it work for me was a combination. I am doing my first reading through the text and making notes as I go on scrap whatever. Then at night, when all is calm and my blossoms are all asleep, I move to my eReader. On my eReader, I happen to have open-domain copies of the texts that I have studied so far including Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow. Here, I am doing a re-read and adding in my scrap paper notes and making additional highlights and notes as I go. I then submit the most pertinent of these to my Goodreads wall, where I am able to reflect back over them as well as share with other like-minded Classical Christian Education friends I’ve collected over the years. Then, I am able to go back and work within the Student Guide to record what I am learning and prompt myself to go back and dig deeper such as I am currently doing with The Raven. I also was able to find most of the stories on Librivox to listen to.

From my earliest memories, I can remember my father with eyes closed reciting from memory the whole of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven with emphasis and feeling. For years, in school, I wondered when we would start to do such memorization as it intimidated me. However, during my Public and few Private School years, we never memorized a single poem. As a matter of fact, the one memorization I remember most vividly was from my AP American History teacher who taught us a song to remember the Central American countries in order from north to south. Yes, you read that correctly. *sigh* For my children, we are thriving and trekking along on an adventure with Classical Education and memorization is key! They have learned so much from the Memoria Press Recitations and through my few weeks with this higher curriculum, I know that this memorization, mastery, and enrichment will continue.

The Poetry & Short Stories: American Literature covers 11 weeks in the official lesson plans and is integrated into the Seventh Grade Classical Core Curriculum Lesson Plans (as well as available independently for purchase, as I did). There is detailed information available for the instructor and/or independent-study discipuli for “How to Teach a Novel,” “How to Teach a Poem,” “How to Read a Poem,” “Memorization and Recitation,” and “How to Mark in a Book” (annotate) within the appendix. Through the process of this study, I read, re-read, read aloud, listened to, and learned more vocabulary as well as delved into the imagination of the time period. Through the lesson plans, there is an essay scheduled only every other week. This is not my forte and I skipped those for this review period. But I enjoyed challenging myself with some comprehension questions orally and some filled in worksheets within the student guide as well as completing a few optional tests. (I got an 80% and 100% if you’re curious…)

The Socratic Discussion and Rhetoric elements are very new to me and I really enjoyed being able to have online forums and family to be able to really put these to light. I do believe that it will still be a long time coming before I feel confident in these areas, however. Yet with this set, I am learning to enjoy the process of really getting into the poem and understanding beyond the surface of a first glance. The lesson plans are scheduled for five days per week, but I do see how someone could stretch it out over a year or move things for a little wiggle room, if not, even picking which poems or literature you chose to feature and study.

This study includes the following: Rip Van Winke, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Helen, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, A Psalm of Life, I Heard the Bells o Christmas Day, Paul Revere’s Ride, The Chambered Nautilus, Song of the Chattahoochee, The Heritage, The Sea Gypsy, Casey at the Bat, In School Days, Because I Could Not Stop for Death, The Pedigree of Honey, I’m Nobody! Who Are You?, Fog, Chicago, The Gift of the Magi, The Ransom of Red Chief, Sea Shell, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and The Road Not Taken.

Poets and authors I am familiar with such as Washington Irving, Poe, Longfellow, Emily Dickinson, Carl Sanburg, O. Henry, and Robert Frost as well as a handful of new-to-me classics.

Many of the poems, such as Paul Revere’s Ride, Casey at the Bat, and Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening we are already introducing to the pegs of information for my Grammar and Primary School aged children. I can only imagine how well they will be prepared for really digging deeper and discovering the Central One Idea when they get there in this part of their journey.

During this crew review, others are sharing their opinions on many other Memoria Press products and I encourage you to check them out on the links provided on the Homeschool Crew blog linked below. Also, I highly recommend you jump back into my archives and see my reviews of Classical Phonics with the First Start Reading Program, which I am about to start with my third student. We thoroughly enjoy the Memoria Press Junior Kindergarten and Kindergarten programs and on this blog, you can find a series of several part reviews with many details on both programs. Most recently, my review on Poetry for the Grammar Stage which we are currently working through with my oldest as she has moved from the Memoria Press Third Grade and into the Memoria Press Fourth Grade Classical Core Curriculum Lesson Plans. Soon, I will also have Prima Latina and Latina Christiana reviews for you as well!

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