Week Three

I was planning out the schedule for next week when I realized that Rosh Hoshana falls on Thursday. "We have a short week coming up," I tell the kids. "No school on Thursday, ok?" Instead of squeals of glee, I hear "Are we going to miss Latin?" "Can we do grammar on Saturday?" That's weird, right? I can assure you that their disappointment in missing the two classes that I anticipated as being hated isn't a nod to any wondrous teaching abilities on my part. Neither is it that I happened upon students who tend to be particularly masochistic. The only way I can explain it is that students (most students) want to be challenged. If you demand something from them that they (or others) thought too boring, too obsolete, not flashy enough, too much memorization, or just beyond their reasoning abilities, they tend to rise to the occasion. At least, that has been my experience here in this short time.

The list of things we covered this week for our obligatory record keeping:

• Continued work in Independent Math
• Paying for (taking out loans) for our houses and education in Life Skills Math.
• In Ethics, the fine line between "compassion" and "voyeurism"
• In Logic, the distinctions that separate discussion from disagreement from argument from fight
• Learning the irregular verb "sum" and its conjugation in Latin
• Mapping the flight of Homo Sapiens Sapiens and the land bridges formed during the Great Ice Age
• Mushroom dissection and learning how mushrooms grow and reproduce
• The death of Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis
• The introduction of Modal verbs and an introduction to direct and indirect objects in grammar
• Continued drafting and writing of novels
• New spelling words derived from the Latin words "credo" [I believe], "laudo" [I praise], "canus" [dog], and "domus" [house]
• Comparing the archetype of the "trickster" seen in the stories about Esau and Jacob and then again in the stories of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel

I am not exaggerating when I say that I spent our 30 minute car ride to our large co-curricular co-op yesterday making up sentences for them to parse. "Give me a sentence with a modal verb and a direct object and an indirect object!" Bizarre. But I also heard this: "Ask me to do a first conjugation verb [this is Latin] in the present tense. But not 'amo'. Make it harder." If you don't believe me, ask them yourself. But be sure to have a bit of time because you won't get away easily.