Tag: Susan Wise Bauer

Our Homeschool Story: Kelly’s Kindergarten and First Grade Years (3.3) Homeschool Planning–First Try

On Friday, November 7, 2014

This post is part of a narrative history of our homeschool. It is about why we chose to homeschool, what we did and how we did it. It is about our failures and frustrations as well as our successes. The plan is to make an honest accounting of it all for the benefit of ourselves and others. This is a work in progress which was started in late October 2014 after the kids had already skipped most or all of high school, Christian had earned a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics (Summa Cum Laude), Kelly had earned a Bachelors degree in Statistics (Magna Cum Laude) and they were ensconced in funded PhD programs on the West Coast. I add to the narrative as I have time.

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I talked to the four or five people I knew who homeschooled and checked out some books from the library to kick-start our homeschool program. The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer and Jesse Wise was all the rage at the time. I bought a copy of the book and really liked what I read. We had some very close friends down in San Diego with three kids about the same age as ours who were going through the same process. With not a lot of additional information, I bought into the very strong case made in the book for Classical Education.

The three stages of Classical Education, Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric resonated with us. The kids were already in the Grammar stage that features rote memorization of facts and rules (for arithmetic, grammar, spelling, etc.). The process, at least for our kids, was a truly enjoyable one that gave them the building blocks for future learning. They loved to memorize stuff and learn rules and facts, but they especially enjoyed it because we did it with them and lots of others (aunts, uncles, grandparents, neighbors, friends) loved to listen to them recite what they learned or hear them read a passage from a book.

The Well-Trained Mind calls for the parent to develop a program that follows a very thoughtful set of educational goals and material to be covered to meet those goals. So I developed a first grade overview/plan to cover those things called for in the book. We traipsed down to the Christian bookstore where we found Christian’s Explode the Code books that had a large homeschool section and bought the materials and books we need to implement our plan.

We still love and believe in Classical Education, but I should say a few words about how it is practiced in much of the homeschool community and many Christian Classical Education schools. We believed and vigorously practice the ideas and methods called for in the grammar and logic stages, but have found that the outcome of many Classical Education rhetoric stage programs is the production of little lawyers focused more on winning arguments than contributing to society. I have written about it a couple times on this blog here and here. Luke Holzmann’s father (Luke is our friend from the Sonlight blog) wrote about this in an amazingly insightful post here. Actually, I found Luke’s Father’s post from comments made by Luke by in May of 2009 titled “Say It to My Face”, but the link was broken. Maybe he can help us with that.

We eventually went away from the methods described in The Well-Trained Mind to something we believe was much better both in terms of our kids education, but also in terms of our own sanity. Of course, I will describe those new methods in later posts in this series. Nevertheless, the things we learned from The Well-Trained Mind served us well during the year we used it and we have no regrets in that regard. I will describe our implementation of that system in the next post.

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Betty Blonde #206 – 04/30/2009

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What influence will homeschoolers have in the near future

By Dad

On Thursday, June 19, 2014

In Education

Tom Gilson of the Thinking Christian blog has an article over at Breakpoint titled How Homeschooling and Classical Christian Schooling Could Alter the Leadership of the Future. It captures some ideas I have had about the impact of homeschoolers in the near future–the next 15 to 25 years. His reasons are different from mine. I, like him, believe the Classical Education movement will have a pretty serious impact on our society. Gilson feels that would be quite I hopeful turn of events. My feelings are much more tempered. I think it would probably be a net positive, but wrote about why the way those methods are currently practiced can be problematic in a post (here) that is now seven years old. The following quote from my post captures the flavor of my feelings about Classical Education as I had seen it practiced when I was looking at traditional school settings and trying to decide what would be a good way to educate our own children:

Our problem with “Classical Education” has not been so much the theory behind it, rather it has been the rigidity by which it is often practiced both in homeschool and private school settings. The end product of such systems seemed to be little lawyers. While that may be a fine end for many, we did not want that for our children.

There are some great things about Classical Education . We successfully used some of the methods and materials described by Susan Rice Bauer in her book The Well-Trained Mind, A Guide to Classical Education at Home. We highly recommend that book for anyone considering homeschool. I do not want to get into the nuts and bolts of Classical Education, but we completely buy into to idea that it can be a good way to impart knowledge to children. The use of that knowledge to argue with force is described in a quote from Susan Wise Bauer’s description of Classical Education on the Well-Trained Mind website.

The final phase of a classical education, the “Rhetoric Stage,” builds on the first two [Grammar and Logic]. At this point, the high school student learns to write and speak with force and originality. The student of rhetoric applies the rules of logic learned in middle school to the foundational information learned in the early grades and expresses his conclusions in clear, forceful, elegant language.

I am sure there are ways that “speak[ing] with force” and using “forceful” language can be interpreted to include grace and charity, but that did not seem to be how it was practiced very often in the Classical Education community with whom we came into contact. We tended toward books like Tactics by Greg Koukl which really talks about how to impart truth with grace and How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie which, well, is about how to win friends and influence people. Neither of these books talked about force. Rather they focused on the idea that there are humans involved in rhetorical interactions that can be accommodated in a much more effective way than by just the force of logic.

I wrote about something our buddy Luke‘s dad John Holzmann posted on his blog a few years back that captures my sentiments on the subject. I highly recommend reading the whole post. Here is the excerpt I posted from a speech titled “Homeschooling – Capturing the Vision” given by Kevin Swenson at the CHEC “Men’s Leadership Summit” in 2009:

He says if you dare practice rhetoric; if you dare stand up and give an answer; if you dare to get involved in the activity of the exchange of information and knowledge–he says, whatever you do, make sure you don’t forget to do it in the fear of God, and in humility before man. I’ll tell you, guys, the No. 1 sin that seems to be rampant in our society today, among educated people–and I’m talking about pastors, I’m talking about classical educators, I’m talking about kids that are out there blogging, I’m talking about pseudo-smart people who are trying to argue their point on the blogosphere–I’ll tell you, the No. 1 problem I see is the problem of pride. It’s everywhere. It’s insidious, and it’s ripping apart relationships in churches. It rips apart relationships in this movement.

As a final statement, I think it is appropriate to post a second excerpt from that same speech:

Now, it’s really interesting that Aristotle does an entire book on rhetoric. I bring up Aristotle because he is the grandpa of classical humanist education, so he does a huge book on rhetoric. I taught rhetoric through that book one time, and there’s so much lacking in that book that I don’t teach out if it much, anymore. But one of the things that’s lacking is any reference to fear and reverence and humility, and yet Peter – the apostle Peter – has one tiny little verse on rhetoric – on teaching rhetoric. He says, “Be prepared to give an answer to every man for the faith that’s within you, yet do it with meekness and fear.” [1 Peter 3:15 –JAH] He has one little verse on rhetoric. He doesn’t forget to include two very, very, very vital issues.

Betty Blonde #131 – 01/15/2009

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Sonlight Homeschool Curricula (Part 1): Why we did not continue with Susan Wise Bauer’s The Well Trained Mind

By Dad

On Saturday, October 1, 2011

In Education, Homeschool

This is the first in a series of articles about why we used Sonlight Curricula in our homeschool. Here is a page that holds a description of the series and links to the other posts in the series. We bought core packages for what would be third through tenth grades in a traditional school. Kelly used the program from fifth through tenth grade. Christian used the program from third through eighth grade. This series mostly describes what we did for all the subject areas except math, music, and art. I have already written pretty extensively on this blog about what we did for math and plan to do a future series on our art art program. We bought most, but not all of our core materials from Sonlight and followed their curriculum guides with a fair amount of rigor. Like most other homeschoolers, we deviated in minor ways where we saw fit.

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About half of the books you see in the mess in the picture below came from Sonlight. We are very thankful we used their curriculum programs as a base for our homeschool for every year we homeschooled after the first grade. Kelly started out at a neighborhood Christian kindergarten. We started homeschool the year after that with programs we put together ourselves. We used Explode the Code to teach Christian how to read when he was four. I read a wonderful book titled, The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home by Susan Wise Bauer that formed the basis for Kelly’s first grade year. Its precepts heavily influenced all our seven homeschool years. I have two rubs against the book that pushed me toward prepackaged curricula: 1) The author seems to be supremely well equipped to talk about history, literature, and the social sciences, but very much less qualified to talk about math and the hard sciences. 2) The methods proposed in the book require an incredible amount of work with respect to material selection and daily study planning. Nevertheless, that is what we did with Kelly in the first grade. It worked superbly for us both in terms of the joy we derived from the day to day work and the academic results.

The Library Wing of Our Bonus Room – Homeschool Materials

All was well, but we decided to put the kids in government school when Christian was in kindergarten and Kelly was in the second grade. The reason was that my job did not allow for sufficient time to prepare, let alone deliver according to the methods and materials Susan Wise Bauer so effectively described in her guide book. The schools the kids attended in Sherwood, Oregon were really pretty good. They stagnated a little academically, but made a few friends and enjoyed themselves very much.

We moved to Albany, Oregon at the beginning of Kelly’s fourth and Christian’s second grade years. We are very thankful to the government schools in Albany because they shocked us out of our lethargy and motivated us to return our kids to homeschool. The teachers, the teacher’s aides, the principal, the school lunches, and just about everything else about those schools was bad for our kids in just about every way. Our experience suggests that government schools are a bad places to “socialize” children. Our kid’s spirits got harder and more aggressive and their academics suffered greatly. The teachers’ disinterest and aggressive worldview advocacy, an unsupportive principal, totally underqualified and surly teachers’ aides, and a plethora of other problems are a story for another day–I took extensive notes on all this while it happened and plan to write about it before too long. I would be remiss in saying that our experience in the Albany government schools was all bad. We know have a much more intimate understanding of the need for parents to take responsibility of their children’s education and not leave it to “professional” educators. Also, there WAS a wonderful school secretary in one of the schools who we appreciated very, very much.

Well before the end of our Albany government school year, we decided we would homeschool the next year. I had a great job, but worked about ten hours per day, so I only had three or four hours in the evening after dinner to work on the kids school. Lorena was (is) a stay at home mom, so she could run the kids to music lessons, homeschool groups, swim lessons, art classes, and all those sorts of things. She did not feel equipped to teach the homeschool. She speaks beautiful English, but Spanish is her first language. She kept the house, cooked for everyone, and usually attended community college three nights per week, so she had her hands full. I agreed to act as the teacher.

I had the time an energy to do the day to day teaching in the evenings and weekly lesson plans on the weekends. I love this stuff, but after my experience with Kelly’s first grade year, I knew I did not have enough time to follow The Well Trained Mind guide in the way that had worked so well for us previously. I wanted to do that, but the time required to search for materials and create lesson plans left little one-on-one time with the kids. That was the other thing. The effort to teach Christian to read in preschool took only about twenty minutes per day for about three months, so I could spend a whole lot more time on teaching Kelly. Now, I had two kids that required a couple of hours of one-on-one time plus an hour or so of planning each night and six to eight hours of preparation on the weekends if I were to do it properly, in the way that had worked so well with Kelly in the first grade. I just did not have the time.

I looked at a lot of programs that summer before Christian’s third grade year and Kelly’s fifth grade year of school. I will explain why we chose Sonlight rather than one of the others in the next installment.

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