Contact St. Thomas Aquinas Academy

Several books we study in the high school humanities courses are numbered by book and paragraph, or by book and line, rather than by page. When a study guide assigns Herodotus I.1–94, it is assigning ninety-four paragraphs of Book One, not ninety-four pages. Those numbers are printed in the margins of your edition, and the STAA Handbook, Part 2: High School Orientation article “Book and Line Numbers” (article 2.4.2) explains how to read them and how to cite them in a paper.

You Already Use This System

Sacred Scripture and the Catechism of the Catholic Church work the same way. We cite Scripture by book, chapter, and verse (John 3:16), and the Catechism by paragraph number, because those numbers belong to the work itself rather than to one printing of it. Any edition, any translation, any size of type: the passage is in the same place. Page numbers cannot do that, since they shift with every printing. The great works we study are numbered for the same reason, so that a student and a teacher holding two different editions or printings can still find the same sentence.

How the Numbers Appear in Your Books

Drawing on some examples from the courses in our Greek Studies cycle:

• Book and paragraph numbers. Herodotus wrote in prose, and The Histories is divided into nine books with paragraph numbers in the margins. A citation of (Herodotus I.30–32) means book one, paragraphs thirty through thirty-two.
• Book and line numbers. Homer’s Iliad was written down in verse, and the lines of each book are numbered in the margins, starting again at one in every book. A citation of (Homer IX.70–80) means book nine, lines seventy through eighty.
• No numbers in the margins. A few translations print only a range at the top of the page. Xenophon’s The Expedition of Cyrus is the first of these you are likely to meet. When the margins are bare, cite the page number instead.

What the Assignment Schedule Asks You to Do

The shaded Assignment Schedule area of your study guide uses four different words, and each one asks for something different.

• Study means read and take notes. Quiz questions come from the study readings, and your written assignments will rely on your understanding of them.
• Skim-read means flip through, looking for topic sentences, so that you keep the context and know what the author covers in those sections. Skim-read material does not appear on quizzes and is not part of a writing assignment.
• Read means simply read it, for the experience and the context. Notes are not necessary.
• Explore means examine a resource structurally, flipping through it to see how it is put together, what its parts are, and how you might use it later in your studies.

A single week sometimes mixes them: study certain sections, skim read others, then study a little more at the end. That pattern keeps the context around the important passages without asking for notes on everything.

How Much Time a Week Should Take

Each full-time high school course is planned at about five hours of study and activity per week, paced over sixteen academic weeks. The study guides suggest dividing those five hours into five class periods of about fifty-five minutes. One day’s plan in a study guide’s Assignment Schedule is built to fit one class period.

Occasionally a week is busier than usual, and when that happens, the study guide says so in the schedule itself. Those notes are there on purpose, so students can plan a little evening reading at the start of the week rather than discovering the need for it on Thursday or Friday.

Resources and Related Reading

• STAA Handbook, Part 2: High School Orientation — “Book and Line Numbers” (article 2.4.2), “Author-Page Style Citations” (2.4.1a), “Citing the Bible” (2.4.1b), and “Citing Church Documents” (2.4.1c) for the citation forms; “The Shaded Assignment Schedule Area” (2.1.1) and “Managing Your School Week” (2.0.5) for the weekly plan. Available on the Student Zone at staahomeschool.com/handbook.
• We Are New to STAA Study Guides. Where Do We Begin?