Weekend Work: Year 9 Syllabus

(I accidentally posted this to my other blog first, so am moving it over here. That's what happens when you stay up too late the night before, and then are doing things in a rush on a Sunday afternoon)

This weekend my goal was to get Sean's coursework figured out. So I browsed through the Kolbe syllabi, thought hard, typed out tables of contents, looked at the syllabi a friend sent to my classical egroup, and finally came up with this:

Year 9 Course Outlines
(it is a PDF)

The way it is structured is basically just as a checklist. Obviously, it is a work in progress. What I would like to add is a table of contents, a list of memory work, and more details about what the method is actually like. But just getting the breakdown typed out took about 4 hours.

I stayed up till almost 3 am -- it is SO. MUCH. EASIER to get things done when the little ones are asleep. You don't want to know how much coffee I've gone through in the past 15 hours. But it's nice to have this written out. Kieron's schoolwork has been flying -- a spontaneous, impromptu approach has been working great for him this year -- I love teaching sixth graders! But it has been harder with Sean because I didn't have things mapped out and he likes to charge through his work and then go about his day. So we'll see if this makes a difference.

One more thing: When I looked at it all laid out, I felt discouraged for a few minutes. I hate feeling like I'm caught in a lockstep with academics. Takes all the joy out of it. SO one more thing I'd like to work on alongside the basic syllabus is a list of topics for what Ignatian education calls "lectio statataria". That means something like a spotlight or focus, or what the Real Learning community calls a Rabbit Trail. It could be a bit like a Main Lesson, too. Basically, you stop for a bit as you progress through in order to concentrate on a particular event or person or theme.

With that as a priority, I will not worry if we don't get all the way through every book. It's just there as a guideline, but if we're finding some richness in dwelling on a skill or a subject, it doesn't matter if we slow down the pace.