Teaching

Inside the monastery, the head of the school was the "magister scholae", the "school's master". He might bear other names. By the end of the 9th century, he was called the "scholasticus". The school's master had assistants who were called "seniores". Teaching methods were the same in monastic schools as in cathedral ones

Due to the scarcity of books, the method of teaching based upon the master dictating and pupils writing down. "Legere" ("to read" in Latin) was synonymous to "docere" ("to teach"). Pupils were writing down the text and the master's explanation or commentary at the same time. They learned by heart. Textbooks were available to the pupils though. They were either works of the Antiquity (Martianus Capella, Cassiodorus) or works by the masters of Middle Ages' beginnings (Isidore of Seville, Venerable Bede)

• grammar worked from teaching examples taken from Latin poets. One read, in a complete text or abstracts, Virgilius, Lucanus, Cicero and the Christian Latins authors as one stressed the pronunciation of lettres, one learned lists of irregular words, one studied prosody -or the science of versification. Etymology almost was used to explain ecclesiastical terms
• rethorics remained arid as it studied the figures of speech and tournures of words
• dialectics, or philosophy, which was the science of reasoning, based mostly upon the study of the 10 abstract categories through which the Greeks -and Aristoteles above all- had sorted beings. A treaty by St Augustine also had written about that subject. In Greek philosophy 'dialectics' originally signified "investigation by dialogue", instruction by question and answer, like in the method of Socrates and dialogues of Plato. That world originally came from the Greek 'dialegomai,' or 'dispute.' The term then came to denote primarily the art of argument or even 'dialectical skill' like exemplified by Greek philosopher Zeno's polemic against the reality of motion or change. Bound up with its content, it even came to signify as soon as by Plato the whole science of reality and tending to be, finally, a metaphysics. In the sense of the logic of Aristotle's 'Organon,' the science and art of -mainly deductive- reasoning was dedicated to exploring purely natural truth as scolasticism used the Aristotelian method too to the elucidation of Christian supernatural truths
• sciences -which were the quadrivium part of the of the liberal arts- were more lightly evoked as arithmetics and geomety could not be pushed far due to that they used only Roman numbers which were not computing prone, and that astronomy and music only served to the needs of the Church, like the computus or Gregorian chant

Advanced studies mostly based upon rethorics and grammar as few place was left to dialectics, thus logics and reasoning as even studies in theology was not that much expanded. The seven liberal arts eventually came to be memorized through two rimes which were learned by heart, with a abbreviation of each name:
'Gram loquitur, Dia vera docet, Rhe verba colorat,
 Mus canit, Ar numerat, Geo ponderat, Ast colit astra'
(which translates: grammar speaks, dialectics teaches, rhetorics give words a color, music sings, arithmetics computes, gemetry weighs, astronomy is about stellar objects). 7 terms also were summarizing the content of each art: 'lingua, tropus, ratio, tonus, numerus, angulus, astra' or 'language, rimes, reason, tones, numbers, angles, stars'

The school-room was the monastery cloister and in some cases, for very popular teachers, the street or a public square. Boarded floors and benches do not appear to have been in use in schools until the 15th century. In the monastic schools, like in St-Gall, for example, figurations of liberal arts were extant in the decoration. Students were sitting on the ground where straw had been strewn. They were writing on wax-tablets. Discipline was a care of the masters as was students' neatness and timetable. Discipline was enacted by the 'proscholus,' the 'prefect of discipline.' He teached how to walk, how to bow to strangers, how to behave in the presence of superiors. Regulations regarding neatness, the hours to be given to work, and provision for the mid-day siesta, etc. show that some attention was paid to the health and comfort of the pupils