Great Homeschool Convention 2018: Two Big Questions

If you have not had the opportunity to go to one of the Great Homeschool Conventions, I can't encourage you enough to start planning right now to go to one near you next year!

This was my second trip to the GHC in Fort Worth, TX. I went last year and was so encouraged and blessed by the trip. I just took in as much as I could from the "mentors" I had been following online and learning from. I got to listen to Dr. Christopher Perrin, Sarah Mackenzie, and Andrew kern, among other excellent speakers.  I was eager to go back again this year!

While I was anticipating my trip this year, I thought of some specific things I wanted to research or get answers to. Over the past year, I've done a lot of comparative analysis of many of the most popular Great Books programs out there, trying to wrap my head around what it means to teach/read the Great Books and how to do it in high school. (The spreadsheets I've made of book lists make my head spin...)  I went really looking forward to talking to the publishers of some of those programs and hearing from them about why their programs were laid out the way they were. I have felt like all of them (with the exception of Memoria Press) have unrealistic book lists, and I kind of wanted to hear their defense for their choices and why I should require my kids to read that many (challenging!) books over 3-4 years. :) 

My second question was much less straight forward. Pursuing a liberal arts education for our kids as we are, I have been doing some reading and study on... the seven liberal arts. I feel like as a community classical educators have a pretty good handle on the lower three arts, the Trivium. These arts are Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, which are arts of language. From a mastery of these arts, students proceed into a study of the four upper arts, the Quadrivium: Arithmetic/Number, Geometry, Music/Harmonics, and Astronomy. I've heard these described like this: 

-Arithmetic: the art of number

-Geometry: the art of number in space

-Music: the art of number in time

-Astronomy: the art of number in space and time

Clear as mud, right??  Yeah, me too. I really want to explore these ideas, and had some ideas hammered out, thanks to the excellent Classical Homeschool Podcast by Jennifer Dow and Ashley Woleben. But I wanted to talk to three specific people who I felt had done a good bit of reading and thinking about these arts and could have some input as to whether I'm heading in the right direction or not. 

I needed to plan to spend a good bit of time in the Expo Hall in order to get answers to all these questions, but didn't want to miss any of the wonderful sessions! There were like three lectures at each  hour that I would have enjoyed hearing.  

I ended up attending the following lectures: 

-Andrew Kern: Faith and Thinking: Is There Room for Both in Homeschool?

-Brandy Vencel: Thoroughly Christian Education: Charlotte Mason meets Thomas Aquinas

-Adam Andrews: Teaching with Grace: An Unlikely Path to Success

-Andrew Kern: Why Should Christians Embrace Classical Education?

-Adam Andrews: The Seven Laws of Teaching and Other Myths

-Classical Education Unhinged: A Panel Discussion

-Janice Campbell & Carol Reynolds: Literature and the Arts Can Help You Teach

-John Mays: Science and the Poet Should Be Friends

Andrew Kern: Christ: The Wisdom and Virtue of God

After my first opportunity to listen to Adam Andrews, I loved so much what he had shared about teaching literature that I made a beeline for his booth in the expo hall afterward. I wanted to talk to him about teaching Great Books in high school.  I told him that I had been looking at the different Great books programs and I just felt like they were all trying to do too much.  His eyes lit up and he said, "You're right!! They are all trying to do too much! Hold on to that!"  We talked about the feasibility of putting together our own book lists for high school and reading deeply, and he was so, so encouraging.  I already owned his Teaching the Classics curriculum, but had never seen some literature guides they publish for different levels, as well as a book called Reading Road Maps that has a book list for each year K-12. The book lists are thorough, but also quite restrained and look very do-able from a perspective of teaching for delight and rest. I was sold! Dr. Andrews saved me a lot of time talking to other companies by giving me confidence to trust my gut and do what I know is best. I just needed someone to give me permission to create my own book list.  Since I came home, I've discovered quite a few other curricula/resources/companies that have a "less is more" approach to literature, which has just affirmed even more we're going in the right direction.  (Center for Literary Education, Excellence in Literature, Scholé Academy Great Books classes, and Greenleaf Press history and lit guides)

I so enjoyed Brandy Vencel. Her talk was an hour-long contemplation on the Florence fresco so often referenced in Charlotte Mason's works that depicts Thomas Aquinas and the seven liberal arts and then some. There is SO much to that fresco and I loved learning a lot more of the depth to the history of the painting. 

In Faith and Thinking, Andrew Kern made the case that without faith, no one would think. He asked, "If you knew there was no answer to a question, how long would you think about it? If you didn't believe there was a solution to a math problem, how long would you try to solve it? You wouldn't." Faith is the precursor to thinking, because without faith there is Truth to be found, you will not even seek. So thinking is the very evidence of faith. I loved that!  That's a very simplistic and basic summary of everything he covered in that talk, but it was my main takeaway.  

A surprising theme that emerged for me happened on Saturday.  Carol Reynolds, Janice Campbell, and John Mays all talked about the same idea: gaining knowledge of one thing through another, namely, through art.  They all made the case that you can grow in depth of knowledge of literature, and in science, by pursuing and engaging art that depicts those themes.   Reynolds and Campbell had a great session on tracing a story through its historical artistic expressions.  They showed different paintings, musicals, and orchestral/ballet productions of the story of Romeo and Juliet. It was beautiful to see how differently it was interpreted by people, and each one brought more depth to the story!  John Mays of Novare science gave a wonderful talk on artistic presentations of scientific ideas.  He gave a handout that had an extensive list of poetry, stories, paintings, music, and more that encourage students to think more deeply about scientific concepts.  It was one of my favorite sessions because it took me in a direction I least expected and was so pleasantly surprised by. 

Throughout Saturday, I got the chance to talk to Brandy Vencel (Afterthoughts and Scholé Sisters) briefly, and Martin Cothran of Memoria Press for a bit longer, to get their thoughts on teaching the Quadrivium. Brandy talked mostly about harmonics, and suggested learning harmony singing, specifically Sol Fa, and named some resources that would be good for that.  Martin talked mostly about math, the need for mastery-based math curriculum, and suggested having the kids take a drafting class in high school.  I also got to talk to a  couple of people at the Circe Institute booth who said various things, like learning an instrument and singing is good for music, mapping the night sky through the year is appropriate for astronomy, and things like that.  

After my last session, I was able to get a few minutes to talk to Andrew Kern about this. I had the highest hope for his thoughts on the quadrivium, and he so graciously gave me about 40 minutes of his time to talk through it. I felt like he really understood that I wanted to know more than just some practical applications of how to "teach" these arts.  He calls them arts of truth perception, so I felt like  there's got to be more to it than learning an instrument and taking a drafting course, as good of a start as those things might be. Through picking his brain, the big Ah-Ha I had was that I cannot treat these arts as subjects. It's not like I can find a curriculum or book and study each one for a year.  This is not how they work.  And that's about all I know. :)  He did point me in the direction of a few other resources to read more, so I hope to keep pursuing this and growing!  I still think there's a place for studying these arts, especially what people in the past have thought and written about them.  I'm trying to work out what it will look like. The good news is that as classical education is being rediscovered, no one really knows. So we're all just learning by trial and error. As Andrew Kern said, we're all archaeologists unearthing classical ed and it is not all yet clear, we don't have all the answers yet (and probably never will). So we'll just do the best we can!

So I came home feeling so encouraged that I'm heading in the right directions and challenge to keep asking questions and pursuing growth. I'm so thankful I had the opportunity to go again this year!