(upbeat music) - Welcome friends to this episode of the "Everyday Educator" podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I'm excited to spend some time with you today as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, I'm excited to be back with you today. We've had six weeks of summer book club and summer reading.

And while I have enjoyed sharing stories with you and your kids, I'm super excited to get back to interviewing people who can help us all grow in our understanding of classical education, yes, but also in ways of building a family culture of learning. How can we do this big, audacious task of educating the next generation together?

And how can our families learn to love one another more and see Jesus more every day by learning together? So today I have one of my dearest friends, Heatherly, and she is gonna talk to us about building a family culture of learning around something that may either intimidate you or let's be real, not excite you very much.

Heatherly Sylvia is the very one to get you more excited about Latin. So Heatherly, thank you for coming on today. - I am so excited to be here. Thank you, Lisa. - I always love to talk to you because I always learn something from you. You always have a nugget of wisdom that the Lord has shown you as you have walked this homeschooling journey with your children.

And so I wanna take you way back, maybe to the beginning, when you guys were looking into classical conversations, what did you think when you discovered that your kids would be learning Latin in the challenge program? And when did you discover that? When you first found the program, when your kids first got into the challenge years, what did you think?

- Well, I first discovered that we would be learning Latin when someone first handed me the foundation's guide in order to encourage me. I've shared this story before, but I was actually brought into classical conversations by a friend who had started the year before me. And she was able to show me how Cece could give me the tools I needed to be confident in homeschooling.

There were some things I was just lacking and Cece gave me those tools. So when I first looked at the challenge guide, I saw that Latin was one of the pieces of new grammar. And I thought it was great. I'm a nerd. I love learning new things. The idea of learning Latin alongside of my kids at that point sounded just really fun because we were learning, I started in cycle three.

So we were actually learning part of the Latin Vulgate. We were learning John one, one through seven. So I thought it was just fun. And I thought it was a fun party trick. It wasn't until the first time I looked at the Latin one, the Henley Latin one, that I started to get a little nervous.

And thankfully I had been in Cece for three years at that point when I stepped into challenge. So I knew that Cece was gonna give me the tools I needed to learn and the tools I needed in order to teach my children. So it was sort of a mixture of excitement, enjoyment, intimidation.

And please don't misunderstand me. I'm a passionate Latin student now. I was not a passionate Latin student when I first started challenge. It was not one of the strands I was most excited about. So I truly was won over. - I think that's awesome. And I love that you brought out the fact that your first exposure to Latin was not in the challenge program, but in the foundation years.

That's really cool. So let me ask you this. If you were talking to a first time Cece family, would you be able to say that the Latin memory work that you did with your children in foundations helped you get ready for deeper Latin studies later? - My favorite thing is when the kids come into challenge and they realize that they already know so much of the Latin because they've memorized it in the form of noun declension and verb conjugations.

And it's such a gift. And do they come in knowing all the details or understanding how it works? No, but when you turn in, I think it's week one or week two of challenge A and they have to memorize the first declension noun endings and anyone who's been in foundations already knows them.

Don't let that discourage you if you come in challenge and you're not a foundations parent because you can just borrow the CD or download the app and quickly learn the same songs the other kids did. Very, very quickly. But I found it helpful. I found it really helpful to just have that and for my kids to very quickly be able to connect the foundations work.

I think a lot of times our parents don't understand how carefully the foundations memory work was curated and that every bit of it is used in some way in one of the challenge levels, if not many of them. - That's really true. And I believe that you're right. I know that when our family got involved and it was a long time ago, admittedly, I did not realize how much my children would carry forward into the challenge program.

And sometimes, like you were implying, sometimes the carry over was slight. But for instance, in Latin, it was nice for my children to go into challenge looking at this foreign language. And it was actually not completely foreign to them because they had been looking at these words and thinking about words having endings for years.

And so that was a blessing. So let me ask you this. Did you have a Latin background? Did you take Latin in high school or junior high or anything? Did you have any kind of Latin background before you dipped into Latin with your kids? - When I was in sixth grade, we had a sixth grade event called Rome Day where we all dressed in togas and did the approximation of ancient Roman activities.

And our assistant principal had either been in a Catholic school growing up or had worked at a Catholic school and taught us the Old Grey Mare in Latin. - Oh, how fun. - Which I remembered very badly when I actually went, became someone that actually cared and thought about Latin.

And I thought about what I was singing. I realized I had really-- - Butchered that. - Really butchered it over the years. I mean, sixth grade was a long time ago now, but that was my only exposure to Latin other than just as a student coming across expressions and realizing that they were Latin.

But other than the fact that it sprinkled throughout our English writing and in our United States history and United States documents, I didn't have any exposure to Latin at all. And it actually was very exciting for me that I was going to learn Latin because I really loved the idea of being able to eventually read the original Latin documents like the Aeneid, being able to read that in Latin.

I knew, and I was right, years later, to be able to start piecing together my own translation and read it for understanding. And I was really excited about that. I love that idea. - That is so cool. I will say that to some of our listeners that may come out as super nerdy.

- Oh, absolutely. I own it, I own it. - I appreciate that. I appreciate that. Okay. So I know that we are talking to a lot of listeners who maybe aren't as nerdy as you or nerdy as me even. And so they may be sitting here thinking, well, great, you wanted to learn this hard thing and you were looking forward to, for some reason, translating original Latin documents.

But I am just trying to survive homeschooling with my kids. And so I know we're talking to a lot of parents who don't have a Latin background. And so I'm easing us into thinking about this. And I want to say to parents, if you're listening and that's you, you don't have a background and you never really thought about wanting to do this and now yet here you are.

And we feel your pain and there are other people who have felt your pain. Heatherly, what initially intimidated you about learning a language as an adult? - The first thing that intimidated me was the fact that I had so little of a base of understanding it. I had studied foreign language in high school, but not successfully.

I didn't have to take foreign language in college for my degree because my degree was a Bachelor of Science and my university didn't require it. So I didn't really know how to learn a foreign language. I didn't know how to approach it. The book looked boring, everything looked scary.

Why are there two books? Why are we doing the same book for three years? So there were a lot of things that I looked at it and I just got very overwhelmed, very overwhelmed. - Yeah, that is good. So- - It's normal, it's very normal. - I was gonna say, that is good to hear you say that because a lot of us, you get these fat books and you open them up and 90% of the words you can't read and you're supposed to figure out the language and the system for learning the language.

And like you said, if you don't have any experience at all with learning a foreign language, you think I don't even know how to do this. It's not that I don't know this, I don't know how to learn this. Had other people made Latin seem like a hard, scary mountain to climb?

- I have to think about that. I don't think so. Our community was pretty young when I stepped into Latin. And so there had been a few people that had gone before me. I am a support representative, which means that I support challenge tutors and I was supporting challenge tutors before I became one.

And they were not overwhelmed by it. They talked about how it was hard work in the beginning just to get into a rhythm and into a routine and for them to remember how to memorize vocabulary and things like that. But no, I actually had a lot of encouragement. I also had a, I assigned myself as an SR, I assigned myself a challenge mentor.

And that is my good friend, Jennifer Deverex, who now is a certified Latin apprentice through Circe. So I had a good mentor to just go ahead of me and say, read the book, like actually read the Henley One book, because if you try to skip and just do the exercises, but you haven't read what Father Henley is saying, it doesn't make any sense.

- Right, right. - But actually just take a few minutes and read what he's saying. It's actually very logical. - Oh, that's good. - And so that was the best piece of encouragement, the best piece of advice I was given. Just read the book. - I love that. You know, here's the thing, parents, your students are not inclined to read the book.

You know, you're teenagers, they are inclined to find the exercises and do the best they can with what they saw in class. They don't want to read the book. So don't be like your students, read the book. That's really, that's really, and then you'll be able to help them because you will have read the book.

- So it sounds like what you're saying, Heather Lee, is that we as parents really need to become the lead learner in our home for Latin studies. I mean, I know that there are probably lots of parents out there who were hoping that we were going to say, "Oh, you don't really need to be the, you don't need to learn it along with your kids.

You just help them read the syllabus, read the guide, make a plan, crack the whip over their flashcards and their exercise production, and it'll all be fine." But it sounds like you were saying, "Mm, the better way is to be the lead learner." - I tell my parents in my area frequently that the classical education does not happen instantaneously, it's not guaranteed just by checking the boxes in the challenge guide and getting the work done.

If you're handing your children the work to do and they're doing it, even if they're doing it really well, that's not where the classical education is happening. That's where the good content is happening. But the classical education, the idea of the mentor leading the student, the practicing of the tools, the Socratic dialogues, the mimetic lessons, all of those classical tools that make this a classical education as opposed to just really well-curated good content, that happens at the table, shoulder to shoulder.

And if you are not, at least in some capacity, sitting shoulder to shoulder with your students, then you are missing out on the best parts of having a classical education. - Oh my goodness, I feel like, okay, all you listeners, you need to stop the tape and roll it back just a minute and listen to all of that again.

That is, I suspect that will be the gem from this podcast that you can give your student the content of a classical education if you turn them loose with the guide and all of the resources. You cannot give them a classical education if you don't sit and learn together, if you don't mentor them, if there's no relationship.

A classical education is a relationship education. That's so good, Heather Lee. Okay, so let's do it this way. Lots of our parents who are listening have been through IEW with their children with their essentials kids, and some of them have been through lost tools of writing. And more of us know how to write an essay than know how to speak Latin.

So let's do this. Pretend that I ask you to write a persuasive essay about learning Latin with your kids. What would your exhortium be? I mean, how are you gonna go about grabbing a hold of parents so that they listen to what you have to say? - So one of the types of exhortia that we learn about in lost tools of writing is a quote.

And I actually have two quotes that I would use. So my first would be from Deuteronomy six, and it would be verse seven, which is right in the middle. So please go read Deuteronomy six for the context. It says, you shall teach them diligently to your children, meaning the words of God, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise.

And we know that that doesn't mean just in those four times. We know that that encompasses, that means everything that happens in between sitting in your house and walking by the way and lying down and rising. So you're supposed to teach them diligently always. So I would use that quote.

We need to teach the things of God. And of course the refutation of that people would say, well, Latin isn't the things of God. Latin is created by man. And as I'll talk about later in C, when I'm giving my proofs, I believe that studying Latin will help us to think thoughts after God.

- Lovely. That's really good. That's a great exhortium. Who among us as parents don't want to have more conversations with our children about the Lord? And there are probably few of us who automatically associate studying Latin with talking about Jesus. So that's really cool. I like that. All right, what would your thesis be?

What's your thesis? Why is it so important to learn Latin alongside our kids? - My thesis, so for three reasons, a parent should learn Latin alongside of their child for three reasons. First, if a parent does it, it shows the student that you believe it's valuable. Second, studying Latin improves the way you think.

And third, studying hard things is a natural way to build a relationship with your child and to increase your discipleship opportunities. - Ooh, I love that. So I mean, I could definitely pontificate on each of those. So the first, if a parent does it, it shows that you think it's valuable.

I grew up in a home, and I think I'm Gen X, I'm a little bit older now, but I definitely grew up in a time when parents said, I say jump, you say how high, right? It was do what I say and not necessarily what I do. And the way our culture often says is do what I say, but not what I'm not willing to do.

You do it because it's good for you, but I'm not gonna do it because I don't want to. And the other piece of that is that our culture says, you do you, you do what makes you happy, find your identity. And when you are doing this alongside of your children, when you are learning, even if you only learn 10% of what they end up learning over their six years of Latin, what you're doing in that shoulder-to-shoulder time learning Latin together is you are adding to your family culture.

There are things that you are learning that are going to become inside jokes. They're gonna become things that you can refer back to. It just, and you are showing them by doing that, you're showing them this is important. It's valuable to me. My friend Naomi used to say her daughter would sometimes maybe not have all of the Latin done that she was expected to do.

And Naomi would say, I know that you had the time because I made the time for you. So that's something that we need to do, that Latin cannot be the thing that just gets shoved at the end of the day and the kids do if they have time. We need to show them that it is valuable.

We're gonna make time. We're gonna carve time out of our schedule. And don't misunderstand me. I am not saying that four days a week for an hour that you're sitting and doing Latin shoulder-to-shoulder. I understand that many of us, our schedules don't allow for that, or just the makeup of our family, the age of our other children, how many children we have doesn't always allow for that.

But if you are carving out some time regularly, that is going to show more than you telling them, it's gonna show them that this is something that I see as valuable. And honestly, if you are a parent listening and you're like, but Heather Lee, I don't think Latin is valuable.

I don't understand. I don't agree. I think we should be doing something different. That's okay. But would you pray to have an open mind about it? Because there is a reason that Latin has been studied since the medieval time. There is a reason that this was one of the classical languages that was carried forth.

There's a reason why it's important and that so many classical curricula use Latin as their language. Ask God to show you, pray with your student and say, show us why this is valuable. Show us why this is important. And then have a teachable spirit. Be willing to have your mind changed because when you do that, God will show you his purpose for you in this.

And there are plenty of articles out there on the reasons that we should study Latin. And I know that this is not an apology for why we study Latin. We're not giving you our reasons why we should study Latin. We're gonna assume you know that. But if you don't know that, if you're not convinced, pray and ask God to show you 'cause he will.

There's some cool nuggets in there. - That's really good. I love your first reason. And you're right. If a parent makes time to do this shoulder to shoulder with their student, the parent is illustrating, not just saying, but illustrating that this is a valuable study endeavor. And it might be valuable for a lot of reasons.

It might be valuable because we'll all have Latin mastered in six years. It might be valuable because we will spend hours and hours and hours, shoulder to shoulder, studying and excelling together over six years. But the nugget for me is that great truth that we make time for what is important.

And if we carve out time with our student, for Latin, we are illustrating to them this, this is one of the important things that our family will stand on together. And I like that. Very good, very good. All right, so talk to us about that second reason that studying Latin actually improves our thinking.

- So Latin is a very methodical, logical language. It is very precise. And I think better because I have learned to be more careful in the things that I write because of my study of Latin. English is just such a difficult language because it is such a mixture of so many languages.

But in Latin, you learn precision, you learn conciseness. And it is more precise than English in almost every situation. Also, and this is something that I've talked about a lot with Jennifer who started out as my Latin mentor and now is my Latin teacher. I actually have, I'm taking a class with her 'cause I wanna be a better Latin student.

But she has emphasized that language is tied to the worldview of the native speaker. So it gives us a different perspective. When you read Latin, and we start in challenge two, we start reading original writings. We read Caesar, we read Cicero, we read Virgil. And you learn so much about their culture and their worldview and where they were coming from when you read the way that they wrote.

Learning about the way that the Latins talked about time. They spoke of time so differently than we do in America. And even that alone just helps you to just think differently to expand your understanding, to think about other cultures and the fact that the way that you or your family or your region or your country does things is not the only way.

And also we're improving our thinking because so much of America is a result of how the Romans thought. So you will better understand American politics, American history, if you understand the Romans. And the best way to study the Romans is to read what the Romans wrote and to understand what the Romans wrote.

If you wanna know why we are a republic and not a democracy, then you need to read the writings of the Romans as they talk about the republic. So if you wanna avoid having a dictator, read the Romans and see what happens when they had emperors. So it's a really important piece.

So it both helps you with your thinking with content, like it's actually filling you with this content that helps you to just think through a broader lens, but it also just because it is such a methodical, precise language, it just makes you a better thinker, a better speaker, a better writer, a better communicator.

- I like that. I like that. I don't know if I've ever heard anyone articulate that Latin will help us to be better communicators, both better writers and better speakers because it encourages us to use precise language and concise language so that we can say exactly what we mean and not too much of it so that we leave people with our exact thoughts and reasons and space to think about it.

I like that. It's really good. So the third reason that Latin with our children is that it's a discipleship opportunity. - It is. I believe that every piece of homeschooling is a discipleship opportunity. I take discipleship and mentorship very seriously. In my life, Titus 2 is one of the most important sections of scripture for me as a leader, as a parent, as a friend.

And in Titus 2, they talk about how the older women should train the younger women and the older men should teach the younger men. And it talks about loving your husbands, for the women specifically, it talks about training the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and pure, working at home, being kind and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.

That's Titus 2, verses four and five. I believe that a lot of times, the background work, the hard things that we do outside of loving our husbands and loving our children and following God, I believe that the hard things that we do, even if we cannot see them as connected to those bigger picture callings that we all have, I see that all as developing piety.

So in the classical tradition, piety is having your loves properly ordered. It's knowing that it's loving God, then loving others, and then loving yourself. It's knowing that we have a responsibility to be faithful spouses and to be parents that train our children in the fear and admonition of the Lord and give them all that they need and all the instruction and wisdom of the Lord without driving them to exasperation.

And that's Ephesians six. And I believe that when we sit shoulder to shoulder and we look at our student and they're frustrated with Latin or they don't understand, I believe we can model the fruit of the spirit. I believe we can model doing hard things, that we can build resilience in them, perseverance, that we can teach them to do the things that they don't want to do on a small scale, because a lot of the Christian life is sacrifice.

A lot of the Christian life is doing the right thing, even when it's not the thing that you want to be doing. We have to die to self all the time. And I know that it sounds dramatic to say that studying Latin is dying to self, but isn't it?

When you're taking a half an hour and sitting with your child shoulder to shoulder and reading through these exercises, or studying the vocabulary, when we're setting aside our own desires in order to show our kids that this is important, and it's not just important because someday you'll get to read the Aeneid, it's important because when we have self-control over our bodies, when we are able to train ourselves to do the things that we're asked to do, even when we don't like them, especially when we don't like them, that that's honoring to God.

It's honoring to our neighbor. We're honoring our classmates. We're honoring our tutor. We're honoring each other in this. And it's okay to say this is hard, but the joy when it starts to click, either for you or for your student, the excitement that comes from that. When my daughter was in challenge B, she suddenly realized that she actually liked Latin.

And we came to a passage that Father Henley included in the Henley One textbook on Pearl Harbor, remembering that Father Henley wrote this textbook right at World War II hadn't yet ended when it was published. And so it was talking in past tense about what the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, which she knew about from foundation's memory work.

And then suddenly it turns to the present tense and it's talking about our sailors and our soldiers and how brave they are. And what a joy it was to just sit and talk about that and talk about what it must have felt like to be a student reading about Pearl Harbor and knowing that your neighbors or your family members might be overseas fighting in that war.

It was a joy. It was an absolute joy. And so that began her kind of taking her Latin to the next level and her taking ownership of it and actually enjoying it because it had meaning. For me, that meaning came the first time that I walked through Henley One with a Challenge One class.

And we came to this reading on the Trinity. And I did not grow up in a Christian home. All of the Christian teachings are things that I learned between the ages of 15 and now at 46. And I had never heard the Trinity explained the way Father Henley explains it in Latin.

And the joy of hearing that there are not three gods, there is one God. And there is one Father and one Son and one Holy Spirit. But for some reason, reading it in Latin and understanding it from the Latin just brought a new depth to my understanding of the Trinity that didn't come from reading theology textbooks or from debating the Trinity from my non-Trinitarian friends.

Just reading it in Latin made me stop and think about it differently. It got into my bones in a different way. And I will always love it. And for those of you that have your Henley One book sitting on the shelf, it's reading number 28. I encourage you to go read it.

Most of it, if you have any understanding of Christianity, even with no understanding of Latin, you'll be able to figure out most of it. And it's just a beautiful, soothing reading. - That's lovely. What a great testimony. And I love that you and your daughter were drawn in to conversation about something that was not Latin because you were studying how to read this passage in Latin.

I love it that your Latin studies gave you opportunity to discuss something deeply meaningful to Americans. That's really neat. I love that. I know in a persuasive essay, we always have to acknowledge the real objections that someone might have to our position and your position that we should study Latin alongside our students.

What objections have you heard? And how would you, I want you to offer your refutations too, of course, but what objections have you heard that we can sympathize with and yet urge people to overcome? - The most common objection that I hear is from parents that maybe didn't get this message into them before they started Challenge A with their student.

So now their student has done some Latin independently. And the biggest objection I hear from those parents is they are doing just fine without me. And this is a perfect time for us to remember that we do not put our kids in CC only for an academically excellent education.

We do not classically educate our kids for an academically excellent education. We put them in a classical program because it is a virtuous education. It makes us more like the man, capital M, Jesus. It makes us more like the ideal of who we were meant to be before the fall.

And we do that through obedience and through working out our sanctification. So patience, love, joy, peace, kindness, goodness, self-control, right? And C.S. Lewis says that when we put the first things first, meaning a virtuous education, we want our kids to have an education filled with the fruit of the spirit and moral excellence.

And in our family, that includes having a strong work ethic and being resilient. When we put those first things first, the second things get thrown in automatically, right? So we aim for virtue and academic excellence gets thrown in because when you have a student that is working diligently and being obedient and self-controlled and finding joy and love and pondering God's thoughts after him, you end up with an academically excellent education.

So your student may be getting all the vocabulary right. Your student may be doing all of the exercises, getting them 100%, and they may still not understand the value of the virtue that can be developed in studying Latin. They maybe have checked the boxes, but they haven't become classically educated.

They haven't become virtuously educated in the process. And so I would say you can have an A student and that A student still would benefit from sitting shoulder to shoulder with their parent and building that relationship and building that discipleship and learning together. Because even an A student still has areas where they can improve.

And you, as the person with more life experience is going, that person, that parent is going to pull out nuggets from the text or have a perspective that that 14, 15, 16 year old just has not come across in their young life. - Right. - So that's my first.

My first is it doesn't matter if your child is doing really well without you. We still want better for you and for them. And of course, the second is I just don't have time. Well, I would encourage you to figure out where you can find time. I have one acquaintance that she and her daughter, her daughter was really not enjoying Latin.

So once a week, they would go to Starbucks. She would buy her like the treatiest treat that the daughter wanted from the drink menu. And then they would study Latin together. And even though the daughter didn't necessarily fall in love with Latin, she fell in love with that time that they had together.

And it was an hour and a half out of the mom's week. They got quality time together. They had that time together in the car there and back. And it was just uninterrupted time. You can find ways creatively. And if you truly don't think that you have time, I have friends with many children that are working jobs that have busy schedules.

It is legitimately difficult to find that time. Again, I'm gonna encourage you, pray and ask God, what should this time look like? Is it 15 minutes where you just sit down and maybe you don't work on the vocab or the exercises together. Maybe you just do the reading for that week together and you read about Jesus or you read about American history.

'Cause those are the two things covered in Henley One. Maybe you don't learn a lot of Latin, but you learn enough to be able to have that conversation alongside of your student. Maybe you're sitting there with your answer key open and you're letting your student teach you. Either way, what beautiful humility that shows, what diligence that shows, what that shows your child in just, mom only has 20 minutes, but she's making that 20 minute count.

- She's giving it to me. - Yeah, and she's giving it to me and she's giving it to me with Latin. And I understand, I truly understand some of my closest friends, I've had this conversation with them and they're like, I don't want to, I don't want to. And what I honestly have said is, for me, it's not Latin.

For me, Latin has not been the strand that I don't want to. I will not tell you what they are because my people will come at me, but there are sections of the challenge curriculum that are very difficult for me and I don't want to. And I recognize that it's not about me.

It is about me doing what's best for my student, doing what's best for our family, doing what's best for our community and our class, honoring my kid's tutor by helping my student to be as prepared for class as possible. And so I understand that you might not want to because I feel that way about other areas.

But as members of a classical Christian community, let's endeavor for those things we don't want to do, for those things that are hard, for those things that we just don't see the value in, can you commit to praying and asking God to show you where the value is, to show you where the discipleship is, to show you where the benefit is in you doing this?

He will. He may not make you fall in love with Latin, but he might have you fall in love with your time with your student. He may not make you fall in love with Latin, but he is going to show you why he's called you to do this. Because he's a good God and he gives wisdom without finding fault, James 1.

So even I'm not going to try to convince you, hopefully a few people will hear some of the things that I've shared and they'll be like, "Okay, you've convinced me." But if I haven't convinced you, that's okay. The only thing I really want to convince you of is that it is there for a reason.

Classical educators have put Latin as one of the central pieces of what they do, of what makes it classical, as opposed to just good. And I'm asking you to ask God to show you, you the value for you, for your family. - That is so awesome. I feel like we have not so much had a treatise on why study Latin as it is what God wants to do.

And it is get ahold of your heart and give you his heart for your children, your family, your community, your world. I love all of this, Heatherly. And I appreciate you prayerfully offering to us these great reasons to study Latin alongside our children. Not to agree that Latin is good for our classically educated family, but to study shoulder to shoulder, to mentor your student and to love them as you lovingly study a subject together.

Thank you so much for your insights. I really appreciate your time. - You are so welcome. - This has been great. And you know, I suspect, parents, that you will find a lot of blessing from spending that time with your student. You may never love Latin any more than you do now, but I bet you will love your student more than you ever have when you spend that discipling time with them.

You know, we wanna know what your communities are doing and we wanna know what you and your family have to celebrate together. We really wanna know when your student or your community has done something noteworthy. We are collecting stories of accomplishments and events so that we can celebrate together and share the excitement of homeschooling.

So if you want to share a success story, if you want somebody to celebrate with, we want you to provide us as much information as possible so that you completely tell the story. If you want to share, go to classicalconversations.com/celebrate-together. So that last part is all one word just with a dash in the middle.

Classicalconversations.com/celebrate-together. And we want to hear some stories of families celebrating togetherness as they study Latin and as they experience the Lord's love in their learning culture together. So thanks again, Heather Lee. I appreciate you, friend. And listeners, I'll see you next time. Thanks. (gentle music) you you