video fun with LTW

We will be using LTW level ONE this year in challenge A. The first several essays are super short and focused on form and learning the basic model and structure of a persuasive essay. Many parents and students wonder why they are not required to write as they did in IEW in the past. They are used to seven sentence paragraphs, five of them, loaded with flowery adjectives, creative similes, and adverbial clauses. They know how to write well. They've learned it. Keyword outlines can be completed without barely a thought - like breathing or digesting.

But what if we didn't have a text to rewrite? Instead, what if we read a book together and then decided to create a thesis and write an essay? What would we write about? How would we arrange the proofs of the thesis? That's LTW.

We will spend the first couple of months learning the model of the persuasive essay and how to think about and analyze a book in order to create a thesis that is relevant and personally fulfilling. Students will be choosing characters and themes that they are excited about - which always makes writing more fun! Yes, it might seem like we are taking a step backward in our writing and using less creativity. But we are learning the parts of a persuasive essay and practicing them over and over until they are as engrained in our brains as the keyword outline. By the end of this first year of LTW, students will know how to craft and organize an essay from a piece of literature. They will certainly be reading books more analytically. This ability will serve them for years to come: in the writing section of the SAT, any AP tests they take, and any future classes in high school and college.

This silly video shows how even a "boring" and "simple" persuasive essay model can eventually be used to create beautiful masterpieces. It's just under ten minutes long and I think will be encouraging to anyone just starting out with LTW. Enjoy!

the line and the dot - a romance

LTW and the Art of Thinking

Why we think and how we can do it better

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By: Andrew Kern

Image via Wikipedia

We think to determine three things: whether something is true, whether something should be done, and whether something commands our appreciation. In other words, we think to know truth, goodness, and beauty. In each case, a judgment is made. A judgment is embodied in a decision and expressed in a proposition. When we know the truth, we don't need to think about it so much as to enjoy it. When we know what is good, we need to act, which will arouse a thousand more questions, few of which will reach the conscious mind. When we know what is beautiful, we need to adore. Thinking begins when we feel a contradiction. This is because thinking, as we generally experience it, is the quest for harmony, that is, a mind without contradictions. Thus Socrates: "Great is the power of contradiction." It makes us think. How then does The Lost Tools of Writing teach thinking? Mainly by pushing the responsibility for making decisions back to the students. Every essay involves making a decision - whether so and so should have done such and such, whether X should do Y, etc. But if you want to undercut thinking in a hurry, give someone a responsibility without the tools to fulfill it. In my view, this is the cause of over 95% of students' laziness. Therefore, LTW does not drop the task on the student, telling him to bear a burden that his teachers won't bother carrying, and then walk away. It provides the tools to make decisions. First, it provides the topics of invention. These are the categories of thought, without which one cannot possibly think about any issue adequately. It provides practice using these categories (topics) in real world issues, but not issues that concern them directly. They have not yet learned how to think based on principles, so I don't want them getting emotionally involved in issues they cannot understand yet. Because thinking takes practice. It also takes order, and that's what the canon of arrangement teaches. I'm not sure people generally appreciate how important order is to sound thinking. After all, the object of thought is a harmonious solution to a question, and the only way we can know if our solutions are harmonious (i.e. lacking contradictions) is if we see the parts in relation to each other. Thought also requires judgment or assessment. The thinker needs to know if the form of his thought is sound, if the proportions and emphases match the reality about which he is thinking, if the more important parts are given their due emphasis. This tends not to come under the Progressive reduction of thought to "critical thinking" but it is an essential element of clear and honest thinking. In the canon of Elocution, LTW teachers yet another mode of thinking: the quest for the fitting expression, which requires a subtlety of judgment that cannot be gainsaid. Here's the thing: we can only appreciate what we can perceive. What we perceive depends on two things: the thing we are perceiving and the eyes with which we perceive it. Now by "the eyes with which we perceive it" I do not mean only the eyes of the body, but also what Shakespeare called "the mind's eye." The mind's eye perceives what it perceives as it perceives it because of the concepts it possesses while it perceives it. When I listen to music, I cannot hear what my good friend John Hodges can hear. He is a composer with a tremendous and informed gift for music. But notice that he has an informed gift. He knows music. As a result, his experience of music is very different than mine. In fact, he once converted me about a piece of music. When first I saw Les Miserables, I thought of it mostly in political terms and judged it to be sentimental claptrap. But when John explained the musical qualities, how characters had their own tunes, how the story put melodies out in one place, then withdrew them, the reinserted them in other places to tell the story through the music, I came to understand why it is regarded by those who can perceive these things as a masterpiece. I was informed. My mind's eye could see better. My appreciation grew. Even so, modern readers (and that means most of us) struggle to read great poetry, while we can watch movies with incredible complexity. Why? Because since we were very little we have gone to the theatres and learned how to watch movies. We understand the art form without even having to think about it very much. Poetry is not what it used to be, at least not in the classroom. The conventions are regarded as evil, the forms as tyrannical. Consequently, nobody reads Longfellow anymore. But LTW is a classical curriculum. If that means anything it means that we respect the conventions. 2500 years of artistry gave us quite a remarkable treasure trove of riches. In elocution,  we teach students schemes and tropes so they are capable of appreciating Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, and Spenser, and by appreciating their artistry, they can enter into the astounding insights that lie between their paradoxes and dilemmas. Through LTW students begin or continue to grow toward a perceptive, insightful, and refined mind.Standardized testing and critical thinking become fleas they snap off their shoulders because they are on to important things, like making decisions and acting on them, adoring the beautiful, and knowing truth.

The Lost Tools of Thinking

This article was published on the Classical Conversations website and explains more about LTW:

Last year, our homeschool community, Classical Conversations, introduced the Lost Tools of Writing program as parts of the seventh and eighth grade curricula. This was a good, good thing. I am no expert in the Lost Tools curriculum or in the application of all it has to offer, but what I have seen has been fantastic. I offer you one thought in particular to express my excitement.

LTW: The Persuasive Essay

This article is taken from the Lost Tools of Writing website, and is very helpful in understanding why we use this writing program for the Challenge levels:

When you start teaching The Lost Tools of Writing™, you notice early that almost all of level one is devoted to teaching the persuasive essay. You might think this rather odd—even boring. After all, aren’t students much more interested in writing stories and exploring their own ideas than they are in writing about irrelevant things like whether the Roman senate should have assassinated Julius Caesar or whether Scout should have crawled under her neighbor’s fence?

The Five Common Topics

The 5 Common Topics are used in the Challenge programs in every seminar (subject). They are a list of questions that tutors, parents, and students all use to learn and discover new things. Or new ways of looking at old things. You might think you know a Bible verse or story that you've read a thousand times.