Week Five

Monday
 This week we had some interesting classes that all of us loved. First class was Independent Math. We are still doing fractions with Life of Fred. Next class was Ethics. In ethics we learned about courage and trust. We were partnered up with different people and one person had to guide the other, by voice, while the other was blindfolded. The tricky part was the guider had to guide their partner through a maze of mouse traps. Luckily we had gloves on and no one got hurt. Next we did Logic. We learned about "Proof" by lack of a counter-example. This means that if you don’t have a counter-example it doesn’t necessarily mean that the statement is true. In Latin we learned our second conjunction. (-o , -s, -t, -mus, -tis, -nt.) We also played Vinco(Pronounced winco), my favorite game. We also caught up on what Minimus the mouse was up to.
Tuesday
Our first class was history. We learned about Otzi the iceman and learned who he was, and his cause of death. We also learned about the first city, Jericho. Next we learned about the Nile, Tigris, and the Euphrates rivers and the first farming communities in Geography. In science we learned about what overpopulation can do to a habitat and the animals living there. To understand it completely we played a game called ‘Oh Deer!’ It’s a game where you have twenty-five generations. You start off with three deer and one wolf. The wolf has to touch three deer to live. With every living animal it produces one offspring, including the deer. At the end of the day we wrapped up with more Independent Math.
Wednesday
Our first class was Spelling. In spelling we played Spengo(Bingo, but spelling Bingo) with our old words. Then we had a spelling test with our new words and our word derivatives. If we got any letter or answer wrong our teacher pelted a tennis ball at us. You would think that’s harsh but it helped us spell better. For example, terrestrial was one spelling word. If you spelled it terestial the teacher yelled NO and threw the tennis ball at you. Now we know to study more. Also our new spelling words were passed out. Next was reading comprehension. We read where Joseph accepts his family back to Egypt. We also read a story about a stubborn pharaoh and the ten plagues. Then we learned about predicate nouns, predicate adjectives and direct and indirect objects in Grammer. This is one sentence we had to do. Can you tell which is the subject, verb and PN (Predicate Noun)? You are my little brother, and I am your good little sister. (Hint: Look carefully) Writing was the last subject and right now Sophie is writing her novel, Able is writing about the writing prompt and I’m writing this blog. Tomorrow is Co-op and Friday is internship day! Next week will be a killer. (Literally)
Written by Sarah Cyr. (Student)

Week Four

Monday

This week, Pownal Independent School went to the 4-H day at the Cumberland Fair. We each had a booklet that our teacher made that had activities for each barn. For example, in the rabbit barn we had to tally the different breeds of rabbits. The most popular breed was the Satin, but the Netherland Dwarf was a close second. One of my favorite breeds was the Lionhead. I also liked the Miniature Lop. We also looked at the cows. There, we got to draw our favorite cow (or calf in my case), looking for the differences in the breeds. We also visited the poultry, the goats, the sheep, and the horses. After watching some Oxen pulling, we headed to lunch and a look around the agricultural museum.

Tuesday

Today we had Latin, Logic, Ethics, and Independent and Life Skills Math. In Latin, we played "Vinco" ("wink-o" which means "I conquer") which is the Latin version of Bingo. The teacher would call out a word, and if she says a word in English, you looked for the Latin word on your card. If you had it, you crossed it out. If she called out the Latin word, you looked for the English. In Life Skills Math, we learned about credit and how fast interest and penalties add up on a credit card. We made our own credit cards, and we had to figure out how to pay our school and house bills. Should we use a loan or a credit card? In Logic we learned about the problems with general statements and the differences between counter-statements.

Wednesday

Today in Spelling we had a spelling test. After that, we played a game to help us learn our new spelling words. Before that, we had Grammar. We reviewed subjects, finite verb phrases, and modal verbs. Next week, we're learning direct and indirect objects and predicate nouns and predicate adjectives. In Reading Comprehension, we are reading the story about Joseph and his brothers in Egypt. Each time we have Reading Comp., we draw a picture to add to our wall timeline. Word Derivation is the next class. We learned the derivations of "do" ("I give"=donate, donation), "creo" ("I believe"=credibility, credit), "clamo" ("I shout"=clamor), "terra" ("earth"=terrestrial, territory), "avis" ("bird"=aviary, aviation), etc. ("et cetera"=and all the others). At the end of the day we had Writing. I wrote this blog. Able worked on the writing prompt, and Sarah worked on her novel. Tomorrow we go to the Co-op, and on Friday we go to our internships (which is really fun!). I get to work at a daycare! My favorite subjects are probably Grammar and Spelling. That's it for the week!

P.S. Thank you to Carol, our lunch lady, who makes us awesome lunches every day!

Written by Sophie (student)

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.

Week Two

The second week is down and we're still here. I find that in the afternoons, when I'm picking up the classroom, I have the time to reflect on how hard these kids are working and what a big leap of faith they have taken to be here. I am so proud of them.

At this moment, our students are back at their internships. Each has a journal to keep track of their duties, report on how the day's work brought them closer to their internship goals, and have their overseers sign off on how students spent their mornings. Before they left for the working world, I did manage to get a few quotes from them regarding this past week:

• Writing my novel is my favorite.
• I loved designing and modeling my living space in Life Skills Math.
• Looking for mushrooms and lichen was fun.
• I was surprised Homo Sapiens Sapiens outlived both Homo Sapiens Heidelbergensis and Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis. [And yes, they did use the genus, species, and sub-species names on their own. I didn't enhance that quote.]

Other topics covered this past week that didn't make the "quote cut" were:

• Fraction logic in Independent Math
• How to read a pay stub and figure out where all those taxes and deductions go, and how to compute and price the square footage of their designed houses/apartments in Life Skills Math
• Is honesty always the best policy in Ethics
• The assent from Australopithecus to Homo Ergaster and on to the variations of Homo Sapiens in History
• Labs for learning the Linnaean taxonomy in Science
• More drilling in subject/predicate/finite verb identification in Grammar
• Derivations from the Latin verbs amo [I love] and credo [I believe]
• The most common symbolism and archetypes found in the Hebrew bible [from Abraham to the flight of Jacob]
• The awarding of the first Spelling Bee Scholar Dollar to Sarah!

In addition, we attended our first extended homeschool co-op group in Gorham. With over 175 kids ranging in age from 4-16, this co-op is a bit overwhelming but promises to be a great experience for our students. It is during these co-op hours that our students participate in Odyssey of the Mind, Cooking, Drama, Journalism, and Hip Hop dance. With the exception of Odyssey, these classes run for eight weeks; then a whole new schedule of options will be available.

It's a busy week, and it's a challenging week. But so far, I'm pretty confident that I can say it's a fun week.

Week One

Having finished our first week of school, all I can say is, "Phew". This response is not an exasperated one nor one of exhaustion. It is more a realization that these kids are far more capable than I had believed. Because of that, I'm realizing that I'm going to have to hustle to stay a few steps ahead of them.

I'm writing this update during my Friday morning block. My students are currently attending the first day of their internships. Today, we have students in the infant room at an area day care; a student studying at the Cathance River Educational Alliance; and one at a local veterinary hospital. We will reconvene at 1:00 back at the school for a "head's up" meeting about next week's schedule, and then we will depart for the Portland Public Library and an afternoon of research. Originally, I envisioned these Friday mornings to be leisurely chunks of time during which I would stroll the web for creative additions to our curriculum or quietly flip through student portfolios as I sipped coffee and congratulated myself for another successful week. Once again, the extent of my naivete shocks me. I better get moving; I've got a lot to do.

But we had a great first week, in my opinion. Just prior to writing class yesterday afternoon, I asked the kids to list some of the lessons they particularly enjoyed this past week so I could refer to them in this blog update. This was the list I was given:

• I liked the Life Skills class when we chose a career and got to make our own business cards.
• We learned about simple and compound interest and which is a better deal when we borrow money and which is better when we save money.
• During Ethics, I liked separating the arguments into Consequential [moral] reasoning and Categorical [moral] reasoning.
• The "amo" chant was fun. [Note: This is the 1st conjugation Latin verb for "I love". In fact, one student [on his own] applied this chant to another 1st conjugation verb "credo" [meaning "I believe"] and was rewarded with a Scholar Dollar!]
• The plant cell and animal cell experiments were AWESOME!
• I liked drawing for the time line. I also liked the flood stories from all around the world.

In addition to what was mentioned above, some of the less popular [but necessary] lessons we covered this past week included:

• Applying our plant and animal cell labs to a lesson on osmosis.
• Introduction to basic Logic.
• Receipt of our first spelling words.
• How to identify the subject, predicate, and finite verb in a sentence.
• The start of our writing projects. We have the beginnings of a comic book, a young adult mystery novel, and a prologue for a young adult horror story.
• Theories as to why our Australopithecus ancestors might have stood to become the first of the bipedal primates.

A pretty good week, I'd say.

Why Latin?

The most frequently questioned piece of classical education is its use of Latin. Why do students in the Information Age need something as arcane as Latin? There are three reasons Latin has long been considered the key introductory language to learn.

First, Latin is the mother tongue of Western civilization. All Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and subfamilies of) are descended from Latin. In fact, they are called Romance languages because their parent tongue, Latin, was the language of the Romans. When a student studies Latin first, any Romance language chosen for study later will be much easier to learn as they derive over 90% of their vocabulary from Latin.

Secondly, Latin teaches English better than English teaches English. Because Latin is taught to be read and not spoken, because it is taught entirely through its grammatical rules rather than the colloquial, students are able to gain a better understanding of the mechanics and structure of the English language. In fact, any other language, not just the Romance but German, Russian, and Arabic, become easier for a child with a foundation in Latin. Students are able to use their Latin knowledge to grasp the framework of all languages.

Thirdly, the mental discipline Latin instills in students makes it the ideal foreign language to study. Latin is systematic, rigorous, and analytical. For these reasons, Latin is superior to other languages in that, like English, modern languages are lax and individualistic and continue to evolve and reflect the modern temper of those who speak them. The study of Latin does foster precision in the use of words. Since one must read Latin closely and carefully, the student’s mind becomes accustomed to focusing on individual words and their usage. This closeness of inspection provides a model for careful reading and writing of English.

Furthermore, children learning Latin will quickly start to read the great classics of Latin literature. While Virgil, Ovid, and Tacitus are uncompromisingly difficult, they do offer students a lost world of literature. These great writers lie at the head of a western tradition in writing that enfolds Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, and Eliot. To be a good reader of English alone, knowledge of the literature of the Romans offers an inestimable advantage.

Lastly, students with even one year of Latin show a marked advantage over their peers in aptitude testing. Years of documentation have shown that Latin students continuously score higher than most other language students in writing and reading. The 2010 National SAT/ACT test results, available here, show that Latin learners perform better than students learning other languages in both critical reading and writing. Latin learners were outranked only by Asian language learners in mathematics. See below for a historical analysis of like data.

Studies conducted by the Educational Testing Service show that Latin students consistently outperform all other students on the verbal portion of the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT).

		1997		1998		1999		2000		2001		2002		2003		2004
Latin		647		651		662		665		665		666		672		674
All Students		505		505		505		505		506		504		507		508
French		623		627		632		636		633		637		638		642
German		624		617		623		621		625		622		626		627
Spanish		581		583		590		589		583		581		575		575
Hebrew		629		634		636		623		628		629		628		630

1997-2004 Taken from Tables 7-3 & 7-4 in College-Bound Seniors — A Profile of SAT Program Test Takers.

Why Classical Education?

There is no greater task for education than to teach students how to learn. Truly effective education cultivates articulate and thinking students who are able to develop facts into arguments and convey those arguments clearly and persuasively. The classical method develops independent learning skills on the foundation of language, logic, and fact. The classical difference is clear when students are taken beyond conventionally taught subjects and asked to apply their knowledge through logic and clear expression.

In 1947, Dorothy Sayers, a pioneer in the return to classical education, observed, “although we often succeed in teaching our pupils ‘subjects’, we fail lamentably on the whole in teaching them how to think.” Beyond subject matter, classical education develops those skills that are essential in higher education and throughout life: independent scholarship, critical thinking, logical analysis, and a love for learning.

While challenging students is certainly part of the classical method, education should also be enjoyable for the student. The classical method is based on the philosophy that students should be encouraged to do what they naturally enjoy during particular phases of their life and be taught in ways that complement their natural behavior. For example, young children in grammar school are very adept at memorizing. They enjoy repeated songs, rhymes, and chants. In classical education, the “Grammar” phase (K-4) corresponds with this tendency by focusing on the teaching of facts. During the junior high years, children often become prone to question and argue. Classical education leverages this tendency by teaching students how to argue well. We call this the “Logic” phase, and it focuses on the child’s developing abilities to understand the abstract, see cause and effect, use formal logic, analysis, and criticism. The final phase, “Rhetoric”, is applied during the high school years when a student’s interests shift from internal concerns to the external (how others perceive them). During this stage, students are taught to convey their thoughts so that they are well received and understood by others. Students are expected to concentrate on using their knowledge and reason to express their thoughts in clear, eloquent writing and speech. A typical classical secondary education culminates with the debate and defense of a senior thesis.

The classical method not only works within the natural tendencies of students, but it develops a true sense of accomplishment in students. We believe that a sense of self-worth comes from accomplishment, and the student who excels after working hard achieves a greater sense of accomplishment. By holding students to an objective standard, they gain a true understanding of their abilities. Keep in mind, we also believe that learning, hard work, and fun are not mutually exclusive. Learning should be a joyful endeavor, one that continuously presents a challenge.