our dozen beautiful feet

A couple of years ago, I started digging into how to teach my kids to really understand literature.  Luke was finishing sixth grade and had read a lot of great books on his own.  But we hadn't done much with literary analysis, or real literature.  He'd mostly read classics for kids or historical fiction to bring his history studies to life.  As we moved into middle school, I was trying to figure out the best way to tackle the Great Books.  I started out looking for the perfect curriculum to guide us through the Great Books, to provide us with a reading list and the right questions to think about. I downloaded samples and made book lists, compared book lists, re-arranged book lists. I thoroughly examined Veritas Press Omnibus, Tapestry of Grace, Ambleside Online, Classical Conversations, Old Western Culture, Beautiful Feet, Sonlight, Memoria Press, Excellence in Literature, Schole Academy, www.classical-homeschooling.org.   With a few exceptions, I felt l...

A little over a year ago, I posted an essay I had written for The Atrium class I was taking through the Circe Institute on the seven liberal arts.  Our fall semester was spent taking a close look at the history of education and the first three arts, known as the Trivium.  That essay is here . I've been meaning to follow that up with some thoughts on the Quadrivium.  It's been more of a challenge than I anticipated. After reading Beauty for Truth's Sake (twice), The Liberal Arts Tradition (three times) and listening to Andrew Kern wax eloquent on the quadrivium for about 16 weeks, I feel like I know just enough to know that I know nothing. Over the past 40 years, the renewal of classical education has done a lot of really great work and made some wonderful discoveries about true education.  There's been a lot of great discovery and reconstruction of ideas in a modern context specifically related to the Trivium arts.  A quick search of "classical curri...

Last spring,  I went to the Great Homeschool Convention in Fort Worth, TX with a big question. For a couple of years, I had been studying the liberal arts on my own. I'd read pretty widely and thought I understood the first three arts, the trivium.  As I began to try to understand the quadrivium, I had read The Liberal Arts Tradition by Clark and Jain, as well as Beauty for Truth's Sake by Stratford Caldecott. I still didn't even begin to understand what the quadrivium was about. I went to the conference ready to ask people for their thoughts on how to teach the quadrivium. I left pretty unsatisfied. I got varying answers from "teach sol-fa for music" to "let them take a drafting class" to "teach them what home means."  I knew I would not make any progress at this point without a guide.   A few weeks later, I heard that a new class was being offered by the CiRCE Institute. It would be The Atrium with Andrew Kern on the seven liber...