SCHOLA: Miss Ann Thrope

Tuesday, March 23, 2004

Miss Ann Thrope

Dear Miss Ann Thrope,

My sister-in-law refuses to breastfeed her baby, she complains that she feels like a 24-hour convenience store. I'm so disappointed. She decided on Carnation baby formula, but they make enough money, they should be using Enfamil, or at least Similac! Any advice?

Concerned

Dear Concerned,

Consider suicide. Stop diluting the gene pool.

Miss T.

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Today is a day for floor puzzles, make-believe, Sims, silly dances and even sillier songs. It's cold and windy and we're just shut up inside the house goofing off today. Well, in deference to friends up north, it's not that cold, but it really is windy. The weather, it's all relative, you know.

G will eventually get around to reading a few more chapters in A History of US and taking notes and has been picking through Mr. Revere and I periodically, so the day is not a complete loss. G even surprised me and asked me what "misanthropic" meant, which was a word we encountered weeks ago in a writing lesson on describing places, taken from Dickens's A Christmas Carol, from Write With the Best. Out came the dictionary (and a new superhero was born.)

S has been calling from her Dad and Grandma's office, asking me to quote dialogue from Hamlet as she works on her latest screenplay, and called once so that G could phone in her interview for G's pet column, for the next edition of the News Peeper, S's whenever-she's-at-the-office publication.

Unschooling is fun!

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Write With the Best is a curriculum with lessons based on literary models from great writers. I had picked both volumes 1 and 2 up when, after beginning Classical Writing, a writing course following the progymnasmata, I realized that we would be outstripping their publishing schedule and desired something along the same lines. This is writing by imitation, plain and simple. I had put it aside when I experimented with Tapestry of Grace, opting for their integrated writing lessons, but now that TOG has been set aside, I'm happily back to Write With the Best.

The girls enjoy it because the lessons are very short and they get to use their colored pencils, when marking adjectives, adverbs, and descriptive verbs within the excerpt and their work.

SCHOLA 101

schol' a: 1) An intermission of work, leisure for learning, learned conversation, debate, disputation, lecture, dissertation. 2) A meeting place for teachers and pupils, place for instruction, place of learning, school. 3) The disciples of a teacher, body of followers, school, sect. 4) An acronym for my tortuous blog title "Secular Classical Homeschoolers' Odyssean Learning Adventure." 5) How my Boston cousins pronounce "scholar." 6) Someone who studies at 10 o'clock for a dilla or a dolla.

These are the blatherings of an introverted, autodidactic, champion of The Enlightenment raising three daughters. At one time or another we have homeschooled, public-schooled, Catholic-schooled, cyber-schooled, unschooled, and even threatened boarding school. We have been inspired variously by The Well-Trained Mind, A Thomas Jefferson Education, and Climbing Parnassus, tempered by the writings and wisdom of Charlotte Mason, John Holt, Benjamin Franklin and Michel de Montaigne.

I try not to get wrapped up in labels, but we are secular and we are classical-ish.

We travel. A lot. Sometimes to the other side of the state and sometimes to the other side of the planet. Join us on our journey as we search for our home, navigate the waters of self-education, lounge with the lotus-eaters, and bash a Cyclops or two.