Now that we’ve completed our first year of classical education, we are thrilled that we made this huge step in our homeschooling.
Studying at the dialectic level this year meant jumping into the water knee deep.
Meanwhile, Institute for Excellence in Writing (IEW) has held our hands throughout the year due to a wonderfully laid out teaching guide and amazing support group.
Beginning IEW in grades 5 and 7, my kids’ writing quickly transformed from incohesive to crystal clear in this clear, informative, and interesting.
In the first few months, they wrote lots of single paragraphs on topic with what they studied in history while learning speaking skills with great clarity and interest.
Meanwhile, my own writing skills also improved.
Even though I was often told that I was a good writer, my teachers encouraged me to strengthen my writing.
Without any practical tips from them, I never improved until this year with IEW.
Now when I blog, I try to incorporate what I’ve learned from IEW, which I sometimes forget when tired, because old, bad habits have become deeply ingrained.
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN TAUGHT HIMSELF IEW-STYLE
Surprisingly, we learned in our first lesson with IEW that Benjamin Franklin, the cleverly creative writer of the 18th century, taught himself how to write in a manner quite similar to the methods my kids used.
I bought it, read it over and over, and was much delighted with it. I thought the writing excellent, and wished if possible to imitate it. With that view, I took some of the papers, and making short hints of the sentiments in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, tried to complete the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentence at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should occur to me. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them…
By comparing my work with the original, I discovered many faults, and corrected them; but I sometimes had the pleasure to fancy, that, in certain particulars of small consequence, I had been fortunate enough to improve the method or the language, and this encouraged me to think, that I might in time come to be a tolerable English writer, of which I was extremely ambitious.-The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
CLASSICAL EDUCATION – IMITATION OF THE MASTERS
As adults, don’t we seek experts in a field we desperately want to learn, to improve, to master.
In fact, those verbs I chose basically encapsulate the classical model: grammar, dialectic, rhetoric.
For example, future chefs dream of studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.
The epitome of the study of wine is in France and Italy.
Can you imagine studying art under Leonardo da Vinci?
DOROTHY SAYERS – LOST TOOLS OF LEARNING
In Dorothy Sayers’ famous speech at Oxford in 1947, The Lost Tools of Learning, which inspire homeschoolers far and wide today, she proclaimed:
In certain of the art and crafts, we sometimes do precisely this – requiring a child to ‘express himself’ in paint before we teach him how to handle the colors and the brush. There is a school of thought which believes this to be the right way to set about the job. But observe: it is not the way in which a trained craftsman will go about to teach himself a new medium.
Since I am not an artist, Sayers’ example makes a lot of sense to me.
I am completely lost with a paintbrush, or even pen and sketchpad.
As desperately as I’d love to be an artist, I have no idea how to begin. My mind is blank.
That is how a child feels when a teacher hands them paper and pen and asks them to write about whatever they want. Their mind is blank.
Instead, IEW uses good writing models for students to learn from, which is classically based.
No wonder IEW is working.
