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Most Teaching Company products I’ve purchased are audio versions and most of what I’ve borrowed are DVD versions, but other than the inconvenience of listening to a DVD in the car and the visual enhancement of the DVD at home, there’s not so great a difference between the two to justify the rather substantial price differential.

If I were on Tom’s payroll, I would be looking for another job. Effective just then.

Despite an undergraduate degree in history, I had taken no Greek history course since basic world history in high school. As a consequence, I went through a Greek phase in my life. The Teaching Company filled that gap in my history education.

My favorite Teaching Company course is “Famous Greeks” taught by University of Oklahoma Classics professor J. Rufus Fears. Fears supplements and augments Plutarch’s Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans (Fears also does “Famous Romans,” also based on Plutarch’s Lives, about which more anon) with incomparable story-telling. I would sit in my car listening to a full second lecture, so unwilling was I to turn-off the rest of Fears’s story. Even my then-quite young children especially liked Fears’s stories.

WhitmanCollege professor Elizabeth Vandiver's “Herodotus: The Father of History” tells the story of the father of history. Or is he the father of lies?

The Histories is an amazing book, filled with amazing stories. Many of them true. Some of them Herodotus believed, some of them Herodotus didn’t.

One example of something Herodotus didn’t believe but he reported anyway, was a theory that snows caused the seasonal flows of the NileRiver. Herodotus reasoned that snow could not fall so far south to cause such river flows.

As it turned out, the people Herodotus quoted here were correct; Herodotus did not understand the effects of altitude on temperature. Had Herodotus rejected the story out of hand and not included it in his Histories, we would be much the poorer for its lacking.

Vandiver’s course helps us to separate the wheat from the chaff in this very important book.

“Sing, oh goddesses, of the wrath of Achilles.” With those words, or something like those words, Homer, or someone we now call Homer, began the Epic poem The Iliad, which Vandiver explains in detail in her two-course set “The Iliad of Homer” and “The Odyssey of Homer.”

Other important Greek audio courses available include University of Pennsylvania history professor Jeremy McInerney’s “Ancient Greek Civilization” and “Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age.”

I enjoyed MacalesterCollege economics professor Timothy Taylor’s “Legacies of the Great Economists” which is a historical treatment of the “dismal science” as well as Taylor’s “Economics.” My daughter, whose favorite book is the retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, Till We Have Faces, loves Houston Baptist University literature professor Louis Markos’s “The Life and Writings of C.S. Lewis.” We have also purchased the VHS series Joy of Thinking: The Beauty and Power of Classical Mathematical Ideas and How to be a Superstar Student, as well as NorthwesternUniversity communications studies professor David Zarefsky’s Argumentation: The Study of Effective Reasoning.

In addition to what I purchase, I find a much more cost effective approach to The Teaching Company products. I ask our local Collier County Public Library to purchase courses, which, up until recently with the slow-down in the local construction economy (they used impact fees collected from builders to stock our libraries, a great idea) and pressure from the state of Florida to reduce government spending, the library consistently did.

Our library’s collection includes and I’ve borrowed the following:

 

American Civil War

Foundations of Western Civilization II: A History of the Modern Western World

History of the United States, 2nd Edition

Famous Romans

World of Byzantium

Classics of American Literature

Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition, 2nd Edition

Shakespeare: The Word and the Action

Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition, 3rd Edition
 

One surprisingly interesting course we borrowed from the library is especially worthy of mention, “The Story of Human Language” by Manhattan Institute scholar John McWhorter. My kids very much enjoyed McWhorter.


I’ve noticed even used Teaching Company products sell at nearly full price on Ebay, which speaks volumes about the quality of the products.

The Teaching Company does have competitors. Some of those competitors products are good and some are competitive with The Teaching Company. David Painter’s The Cold War comes to mind.

But for consistent excellence, The Teaching Company is unsurpassed.