“The difficulty of the journey sometimes turns out to be the blessing.” — Marianne Williamson It’s been a rough start to the school year. Even though our school season has similar qualities year after year, I am surprised by how different this year feels. My Challenge student is in...
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As a Challenge III tutor, I have the pleasure of studying poetry with my students. Every week I read aloud a poem connected to their U. S. History reading assignment. As we study Cicero’s speeches in second semester Latin, we encounter many rhetorical devices there also. We become familiar...
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Classical Conversations’ Challenge program is, in some ways, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life, short as it’s been. It wasn’t the homework that was hard, or the Latin quizzes. It wasn’t the classroom dynamic or the time management that was hard either. I think...
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As I drove home from dropping my oldest son off at youth group, I used the quiet time to pray for God to show me how to homeschool my daughter. This girl is our bouncy, talkative, middle child who cannot stop doing cartwheels or singing. She’s picked out her...
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One can hardly avoid the topic of Common Core curriculum these days. Common Core—shorthand for the Common Core State Standards—was proposed as a way to make sure that American public schools were preparing students to compete in a technologically complex and global economy.
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I love homeschooling and being with my kids. Once in a while, though, I wish that I could do something I did in public school: get a sub. Prior to kids, I just had to write a lesson plan, call the administrator in charge of subs, and climb back...
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Have you ever been surprised by something? Most of us have: a slamming door, unexpected news, an old idea you suddenly see in a new light. In Dorothy Sayers’s essay “The Mind of the Maker,” she writes about the experience of a student who is surprised by a new...
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I have had the pleasure of meeting so many homeschool parents who want to learn Latin prior to or during their child’s Latin education. However, I have also met many people who recoil at the idea of learning Latin with their students. They think that it would be a waste...
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There are not a lot of reasons we could say not to plan. It is kind of like housework—you know the plan is going to get messed up quickly. You know that you will not always get it all done and that sometimes you will have to start over....
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Three months ago I ran my last collegiate 5k race. It was at the University of Kentucky on a big, beautiful, blue track. I’d always wanted to run on a blue track. I spent eight hours in the van with my teammates for the last time. We joked and...
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West End, North Carolina — When Leigh Bortins started Classical Conversations® in 1997 in the basement of her Winston-Salem, North Carolina, home with 11 students, little did she know that her creation would grow to more than 100,000 students in less than 20 years. Leigh’s oldest son, Robert Bortins, now...
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I recently had an aha moment about what it means to enter the dialectic stage. I have three children ages thirteen, ten, and seven. My oldest son Caleb was down at the lake trying out a net he made while I wanted to do a science experiment with the...
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