Episode Details

About The Guest
Mark Signorelli currently serves as Headmaster at Lumen Gentium Academy, a classical Catholic high school located in Boonton, NJ.  Prior to occupying this position, he was the Director for a Classical Studies program within the Chesterton Network of Schools.  In addition to over twenty years of experience as an educator, Mark has also written extensively for a wide variety of journals, including the Imaginative Conservative, Arion, Modern Age, Public Discourse, the University Bookman, and Front Porch Republic.  He currently writes at his own site, The Classical Corner, and has authored several books.

Show Notes

Part 1: As a master teacher, Mark brings years of experience to us about what classical writing ought to look like. Reflecting on a few of his substack essays, we explores many of his ideas and how he incorporates them into his teaching approach. In this episode, Mark unpacks what our goals are for teaching students to write while taking us back to the classical tradition of teaching excellent composition.  He also gives evidence that traditional classical writing instruction actually better prepares students for the College Board exams! 

Some questions and topics we cover in this episode:

• What is the purpose of writing? Is it simply to help student prepare for college or is there something more?
• How do want our students to think? 
• How classical writing builds authentic confidence in students
• What texts to use to help students learn how to write well
• How does a research paper approach differ from the classical rhetorical approach to writing?

Part 2: Mark discusses poetry!  His experience is that students find great joy in poetry and it awakens their sense of play. It helps them develop style and voice in writing. This is a fun discussion that you will not want to miss! 

Resources and Books & Mentioned In This Episode

The Classical Corner with Mark Signorelli (Mark's Substack)
Down with the Research Paper by Mark Signorelli
Poetry as a Form of Life by Mark Signorelli
Some Principles for a Classical Writing Program by Mark Signorelli

Cicero: Rhetorica ad Herennium
Quintillian
The Art of Rhetoric by Aristotle
Categories by Aristotle

Shakespear Sonnets
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
The Writer's Workshop: Imitating Your Way to Better Writing by Greg Roper
The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard Feynman

"Introduction to Poetry" by Billy Collins
Dana Gioia poetry
New Science by Giambattista Vico 

Mark Twain
George MacDonald
Tolkien
Montaigne
Friedrich Schiller's Play Drive
Notes Toward A New Rhetoric by Francis Christensen
John Witherspoon 

William Wordsworth

From Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author by Professor Louis Markos

A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence by Francis Christensen

Tales from Shakespeare by Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb

Aesop's Fables by Aesop

Norms and Nobility by David Hicks