(Not) Back to School…

…And all that.

So many people are back in the school routine. We are not. For several reasons:

1. Our summer just began. Sad, but true. This past week we’ve had our *first* couple days of 90+ degrees. It probably wouldn’t be right for me to complain about how hot and crabby I’ve been, so I won’t. But it is really weird for me to think that there is less than a week left in August.

2. I’m getting very little sleep, and my days are full. full. full. just getting the basics done. I’m trying to keep these little people fed (I use that word loosely), clothed (I also use that word loosely), and safe (“). After that, there are about 2 minutes left in my day to clean house (and I probably shouldn’t use those words at all…).

3. We are still in the middle of a remodeling project. One that has to get finished before I can organize all our school things and get our routine in place. My self-imposed dead-line is September 15th (nothing like company to get me motivated), so we have three weekends of work left. I can. not. wait. to show you what we’ve done. Mostly because that will mean it’s done. I like done. I really hate the worse-than-when-we-started stage.

4. Our year of Classical Conversations doesn’t begin until September 12th. I can’t tell you how happy I am that I still have a little bit of breathing room.

For those of you who are eagerly awaiting the return of our weekly reports (anyone?)—you might be waiting a while longer. I’ve been keeping track of a few things over the summer (mostly Levi’s reading), and will post that before our new year begins.

For those of you who are wondering what happened to my monthly fine arts studies, we’ve still been following our schedule, but the posts haven’t made the priority list. I’ll try to resume those in September with our weekly reports. (Speaking of weekly reports, our fine arts resources have been posted there under, get this, fine arts. {grin})

For those of you who would love for me to post detailed lists of studies corresponding to our year of Classical Conversations—well, that isn’t going to happen. Rather than re-inventing the wheel, I’ll just send you over to Half-a-Hundred Acre Wood. There, Brandy has posted links, resources, lists, and ideas. More than you could ever want, need, or use. And it’s all ready to go. Me? I’ll be posting what we did AFTER the fact, and behind most other CC schedules since we are starting so late. Impressive, I know.

Speaking of what we’re doing: This year we won’t be tailoring our lessons around the CC schedule quite as much as we did last year. We’re kind of doing our own thing and plugging in the memory work as we come to that information in our studies. I posted a list of what we’re working on this coming year, but I’ll be updating it and posting it again in the next week or two.

I am hoping to do bare-bones schooling the week of the 12th, getting our routines into place and hosting/facilitating our first parent-child literary analysis book club (a la Deconstructing Penguins and Teaching the Classics). Here’s *praying* we can get up to speed by the following week.

For those of you who have enjoyed my food for thought links in the past, I’ve got a great one to leave you with today:

Saint Paul and Christian Classical Education by Tucker Teague @ Satellite Saint. (I’m happy to say that I had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Tucker when I was visiting his wife a while back. They are two of the neatest people I’ve had the privilege of meeting.)

But a true dialogue can seem to be unfocused and wandering, which is also antithetical to teaching in the modern sense. Our modern education system is partially based on a sense of urgency–we cannot afford to waste time with thinking when we have so much knowledge to get into those little brains. It is a system that must swap dialogue with lecture. But this modern system denies the existence of the human soul. Is that what we want?