Feel better! Wishing you speedy recovery.

Thank you for the thoughtful multi-prong response. Could you share further thoughts on the above? How have you seen this manifest in your homeschool?

I recently bought the Poodle level for my DD7, and we have gone through the noun and pronoun chapters. It is written in verse which I found confusing at first. The order of words is unusual, you see, Like saying 'green branches abound on a tree'. This is what came up in the style of the book. This is good and bad as it expands the notion of what language can sound like for even a dull subject like grammar, but there are lots of stops to explain tease out meaning. Overall, I guess MCT did a good job because DD immediately got what a noun is, did the practice sentences with ease, and I have asked her to practice on sentences from books we use for read alouds. She did very well. Same for pronouns. She does not ask for it, bit also does not fight it and gets the 'lesson' without repetition so I call that a success!

I listened to Susan Bauer's lecture on writing, which you can buy for $3 in the WTM store...I found it fascinating! The main point I took away is that writing is difficult for majority of kids, and especially 'creative' writing which asks a kid to come up with the content. Kids have trouble with that for even one sentence! So we have implemented a system for my 7 yr old where she only writes 2 sentences based on a book she has read or I have read for her, maybe once a week. The rest is copy work. I base the type of sentences she writes on the method found in the book The Wiriting Revolution which I do not see mentioned on this forum but is extremely good for structured writing and to help reluctant writers. I also recently got WWE for the narration part (as the copywork is a little too easy for my DD...she copies whole passages as the moment with ease, and handwriting has improved markedly since we started.)

Thank you all for the commentaries, super useful to crystallize my thinking around Latin. Latin does carry some sort of mystique of antiquity😜. But for practical purposes in allocating time to different subject it may just be as useful going with something like MCTs Cesar's English as this was mentioned on other threads as a vocabulary building method using Latin stems. I will look at the Song School Latin just to see how it is presented for that age group. Appreciate all the time allotted to this 'silly' ambition of mine.

This is the OP. Thank you for the thoughtful answers especially related to language acquisition later on and the topic appropriateness of some lessons. But even from this little exposure to Latin, literary 4 lessons, I see how useful it would be for 'guessing' the meaning of unfamiliar English (or other romance languages) words. Perhaps we will switch to a living language soon when the grammar starts to get too confusing. So then, why would anyone spend time to learn Latin in full, with all its gnarly grammar rules, if it does not translate to quicker language acquisition later on? Any other tips on Latin?

I was using Duolingo for learning Italian, when my DD7 said she wants to participate too - mostly because she sees the fun characters and rewards and want to "play" along. I thought, "Huum, rather than Italian, why not try Latin with her as it can be useful learning other languages later on..." So I let her start it, she is on lesson 3 or 4...and has not lost interest yet... Would Duolingo be effective? And should I really torture her with full Latin (grammar and all) rather than just focus on learning words? First lessons included words for family members and for the first time I understood where "sorority" comes from since "soros" = "sister" in Latin! Does knowing Latin really help down the road is that just a myth I like to tell myself?

On the topic of plagiarism - to me that is complex. On one hand, AI produced text is not a new/novel product; it simply spits out what others have created as original thought. It is worse than plagiarism because it does what students who plagiarize do - it does not immediately attribute those nicely written pro/against arguments (in my case, I asked about terraforming Mars; it was very competent) to those who came up with them. On the other hand, can we look at AI as a teacher - or a mentor - who exposes a topic very coherently, and you simply take those coherent thoughts, tweak them a bit through your point of view? In this scenario, the AI is the teacher, and you are the student. You got help with the outline, grammar, and vocabulary. If you are a good note-taker in class, would that not be the same? IDK.

Oral and written in class assessment was the only way you earned a grade in the Soviet Block before the fall of the Berlin Wall. There were no subjects where you could take a multiple choice or at home exam, or just present a research paper. You were given a set of topics, about 60 per class, that you had to know well enough to have a one hour oral examination/conversation with the professor. The way you got the topic is to reach in a bowl which contained the topics written on folded pieces of paper, and pull one - basically, a lottery. It was grueling, and people tried to cheat with outlines written in pt2 font on a long piece of paper hidden in your sleeve, but cheating was an automatic fail. That is the good (but impossible to return to) way to exclude this and future AI iterations from the "receiving a grade on genuine knowledge" situation. On the other hand, the AI in its current form can only regurgitate, quite elegantly, original human work. It cannot, at this point, make connections and be "creative." It will need human product to grow its own knowledge. But, there will be fewer and fewer people who may be able to supply this new knowledge if the current and future generations do not learn the hard work of summarizing information and extracting meaning from random connections.