Week 30

I think I can safely say that we are all feeling the effects of this wet and cloudy weather. Here at the school, the energy level has been low this past week for all of us. Our routine was further disrupted by the fact that two of our students are taking the NEWA tests at the local schools for end-of-the-year assessments. Nonetheless, we did make some headway in several of our subjects.

The students have been expressing boredom with the math that we have been covering: using percentage, fractions, and decimals interchangeably and within word problems. I decided to take a break from that topic this week and cover a math concept that is a personal favorite of mine: algebra. The students were less than thrilled, almost all of them claiming to "HATE algebra". I assured them that we would not be examining multi-variable problems, yet. We walked through several single variable problems using a "put all of your cows on this side of the fence and all of your people on this side" method, and they seemed to catch on fairly quickly. And you know what? By the end of the second math class, I think they would all agree that algebra is a puzzle. Not "puzzle" in the sense that it is unsolvable, but "puzzle" as in "this can actually be kind of fun".

In Logic, we continued with our new unit in Propositional Calculus which neatly coincided with our Ethical unit on Aristotle. Basically, we've moved from the categorical logic of Socrates and the Sophists and the logic of the ancient courts to the consequential logic of Aristotle and the scientific "revolution" of Classical Greece.

In Latin, we introduced new vocabulary and English derivatives. We are also continuing our noun declensions. Declensions are tough only in that they require rote memorization. Through our prior translations, the kids have come to recognize some of the endings in an intuitive way: possession, direct object, subject. The others will come only through practice. One neat crossover from Latin to our Reading Comprehension: We have been reading all of the Greek play-writes, and the students are quite comfortable with the Greek names of the gods. We are just starting to hear about the Roman pantheon through the poems of Virgil. It gets confusing, sometimes, keeping track of which Roman god is which Greek god. A very logical approach (and granted, not one that works all of the time), is translating the Greek to Latin. For example, Zeus, the father of the gods, translates to Latin as Zeus pater. If you say that really fast a few times, you'll see how the Romans adopted the name Jupiter from the translation.

In History, we are continuing our study of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. This week we focused on Akhenaten (formally Amenhotep), his wife Nefertiti, and the son King Tutankhamun (formally Tutankhaten). We also looked at why several pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom seemed to have a couple of names. Very simply, the Middle Kingdom was a period of religious unrest. As each pharaoh took power, they either sided with the classical belief of Amun as supreme god, or they sided with the new cult of the sun, Aten.

In Science, we continued our study of Arthropods, class Insecta, specifically grasshoppers and locusts, with a dissection. We got these really HUGE grasshoppers online, and they were perfect for seeing the internal organs. In fact, one of them had a cache of un-laid eggs attached to the ovary!

On Wednesday, we had our weekly spelling quiz, and the students received a bunch of new prefix additions. They're picking the prefixes up very quickly. Many of them are similar or the same as the Latin, so they're easy to remember. In Grammar, we continued sentence parsing, focusing on identifying the types of pronoun in the sentence and the antecedents. We finished reading Sophocles' Oedipus Rex in Reading Comprehension, and we have moved on to Euripedes' Iphigenia in Aulis. Then, after lunch on Wednesday, we went to Portland to our writing workshop at The Telling Room.

Thursday was co-op day, and today our students are attending their internships. Another busy week!