PACES & PAideia

This week JoBeth Mathis (coordinator of logic and headmaster at the Northeast and West Campus) and I are in Williamsburg, Virginia studying the economic trends in American History and their affect on politics.  If this sounds like fun to you…contact me WE HAVE A JOB FOR YOU!!!

Actually, we ARE having a GREAT time studying and discussing the readings of Adam Smith, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Allen Greenspan, and other economists and scholars.  In the evening JoBeth and I come back to our hotel rooms and spend the evenings writing our lesson plans for the upcoming year.  As we determine which weeks to study the Great Depression and when to begin the discussion of World War II, we constantly remind ourselves: “first we read, then we discuss.” If you are new to home education, or new to PAideia you may not know that our philosophy is “You are the primary educator of your child.  Therefore, each week FIRST you will read the material with your children.  Then you will discuss it with them.  Afterwards, they will come to class and discuss the readings with their culturative history, logic, Latin, science, or English teacher.  We try to NEVER discuss material that is unfamiliar to your child.  Occasionally parents ask us,”why don’t you introduce the concept then let us read about it at home.” Philosophically, we want you to be the ‘first teacher’ and we try hard to leave the ‘golden moments’ of awakening to you.  I hope you enjoy each one.  In campus newsletters and on this blog, I will try to trace the journey with you and alert you to what I consider the upcoming GOLDEN MOMENTS!

Blessings

Just returned from SETHSA in time to unpack and repack for the PAideia Classical Conference next week. If you have not registered for that conference IT IS NOT TOO LATE!  If for no other reason, you need to register to preview the new Study Guides.  The quarter one literature guides for both culturative history and English are almost finished.  We have had rave reviews on all the ones that were available at SETHSA.  A vendor that sells other literature guides could not believe that we were selling ours for only $10 when the comparable product at his store was $15-$20.  However, remember, as a PAideia parent, your study guides will be only $5.  We are trying to save parents money that they spent last year on paper, ink, and printer usage.  We are printing the study guides for sale outside the PACES world to continue to offset YOUR costs!  Come to Kingwood for the conference next week and see the guides and learn with us! 

In preparation for next year, I want to encourage all parents to attend our Classical Conference in Kingwood in mid-June.  There is so much to learn and so many folks to enjoy.  While we teach basic principles of classical educational pedagogy, we use examples from the approaching year of study.  In the fall of 2008-2009 we will be studying The Modern Era: 1850-present.  Many find this period the most difficult to teach from a classical perspective.  One method we use in teaching the classics is macrothematic discussion.  This means that as we study we associate the literature, events, and political decisions with a theme or idea that is universally accepted and understood.  Mortimer Adler wrote explanations on 113 of these universal ideas such as love, honor, integrity, and freedom.  We choose to focus on 14 of these ideas in the PAideia Classical program.For a complete list of Adler’s ideas email me.  For an understanding of this approach to teaching attend the PAideia Classical Conference June 17-19.   

As I mentioned last week, the first PACES Classic Literature Study Guides are rolling off the press.  The publication of these guides will enable parents to have one document for the entire quarter with vocabulary, parent questions, journal articles, class discussion, character charts, and writing assignments related to the literature portion of culturative history and English.  I edited the first one, Frankenstein, for high school English, and realized that it saved the parent from 32 downloads for quarter one! Not every work of literature that we study this year will have a study guide (we are still needing folks to help us write the ones for elementary books if you are interested!) our goal is to have at least one study guide for all the rhetoric and dialectic students for each quarter this year.  This means that although you will still download maps and some other worksheets and questionnaires, the great bulk of downloading will be greatly lessened.The cost of the guides is less than $10 each FOR PACES FAMILIES.  We will be selling them to the general public through our website, local bookstores, and conferences at increased prices.  There is a GENERIC appearance to the guides so that homeschooling OUTSIDE THE PACES world can benefit as well.These nonconsumable guides can be used again and again and will save a bundle in paper, ink, not to mention the headache of constantly downloading worksheets from the website.The first study guides will be available for sale at the SETHSA Conference the first weekend in June as well as on the PACES website after the conference!