Wait, *I'm* arrogant? Oh, and as the person who *hasn't* written a book on the One True Way to educate a child, I'm also arrogant? ETA as the person who bothered to learn languages before "teaching" them? And.... etc etc ad infinitum. LOL. Really. No hard feelings. Obviously I touched a nerve. :) I'm sure we'll all feel better in the morning.

OK, well, then let me say a couple of things that may sound arrogant and that may get me slammed. :o: I haven't read TWTM. I've been working towards the ideal of classical self-education/homeschooling since I was a teenager in the 1980s. I prepared for my degree in classics by afterschooling myself in Latin and Greek throughout high school, using the only two books I could find - Wheelock and Hansen/Quinn. I checked out TWTM from the library a few weeks ago and it didn't grab me so I returned it. It just seemed like a bunch of lists. I've been compiling and revising my own lists for a long, long time. The minute I heard the word "homeschooling" (probably around age 20?) I knew that was what I was going to do - and (roughly) how. So I may find TWTM useful at some point, but only in the same way that is true of, say, Math Mammoth. I'm here for the things I don't already know. Namely what kind of materials are currently out there to make the job easier. Some people think it's unclassical to do worksheets. (Incidentally why are they any worse than copywork? Why reject the advances in educational psychology on which the better ones are based, other than to make yourself feel old-fashioned and rarified?) IMO it's a heck of a lot MORE unclassical to do homeschooling from a list of books set before you by a contemporary author you treat as an authority/celebrity. Frankly, on the one hand I am thrilled to find people who have a vision *somewhat* similar to my own but on the other hand some of this seems almost..... gimmicky. E.g.: I'm sure SOTW is a fine book and I bet I will even use it as some point. But to base your kids' whole history learning around it (which, again, I haven't read TWTM so I'm not sure, but by the discussions I hear around here that seems to be the primary mode of use)?????? I am being kind of elitist here because I am the kind of history nerd who can start gabbing ex tempore about almost any historical period (ask my DH lol). I know not everybody can be like that or has to be like that. But honestly, a huge part of the classical ideal is the ability to make your own judgments, and if you don't already have the knowledge base yourself, you can't make those judgments and what you are doing is ipso facto not "classical." The author is making those judgments for you. Making reading/following this one, contemporary book the sine qua non of "classical home education" is therefore totally backwards. If you don't have the background, you can acquire it, but you kind of have to make it your life. Even with everything I already have under my belt I feel like I still have to make it my life to get to where I want to be with it by the time my DD is mature. And frankly I cringe when I see people trying to "teach" Latin by staying three pages ahead of their kids. Virgil and Cicero will make hamburger of that strategy. But you know, "classical" isn't mandatory, it's not necessary to be "classical" to be doing a better job than the public schools, and personally one of my values as a homeschooler is that what I teach be a true reflection of myself and my values. I imagine other people feel the same way too. So it seems to me that most people who don't actually have the background, and aren't able to make a major project of acquiring it, probably are better off with something like Sonlight. Because they do have the background to make competent judgments about what they find there and I don't see how that is any worse than letting SWB or any other author lead them by the hand on the subject of the "classical." For example I see Christians debating whether certain aspects of the pagan classics are appropriate, given the context of their religious beliefs. You know what? That is a huge, huge philosophical debate and has been for two thousand years. HUGE and it's not going to end. Don't ask a message board! Ask Tertullian. Ask Boethius. Ask Augustine. Ask Aquinas and Luther and then, if you're really brave, ask contemporary Mormon thinkers about the conflict between Hellenistic philosophical theology and literal interpretation of Biblical descriptions of G-d. That's the "classical" approach to the problem - not pat reassurances that "without the myths they won't understand Shakespeare". Is that important to you? Well - there's another question! Oliver Cromwell would say it's very important NOT to study the theatre - and I know some of you here are Reformed, right? What I'm saying is that the question of what to study is itself a "classical" question and the learned people of the past, whom we admire, are remembered because they used their background to help push knowledge FORWARD. I mean, there are people here who don't want their children to understand "rigorous" science, and THAT sure as heck isn't classical! So kindly don't tell me I'm not classical enough if I'm not following this one particular book. I mean that as nicely as possible.

I took on heavy debt for a religious school and have never ceased to regret it. What if she wants to be a SAHM? YMMV.

Just like you can't teach math if you don't understand it yourself, can't teach grammar if you don't know grammar, etc., you can't teach history unless you know and understand it yourself. It's not so much about mechanically checking footnotes (sometimes those are misleading) as it is about reading a variety of living, adult books on the subject, from different points of view (and frankly by different points of view I mean different serious scholars, not Howard Zinn vs. dominion theologians). Until gradually you begin to develop a big picture about history and can form a halfway-reliable judgment on where new information fits in. This is a lifelong project but IMO what classical education is all about. Try to guide your DC to look at history as filtering through the narratives received through various sources, rather than one right answer like on a math test.

Since I am new to this, and a disorganized person to boot, I would really appreciate tips on how to organize all the books, curricula, manipulatives etc that will soon be coming to my house. What about arts and crafts, school supplies? What do you do with materials that are necessary for future reference, but you don't want your kid getting into right away? DD is 3 and I am seeing signs of readiness for some of the curricula I've researched, but I won't know until I get my hands on them and surely some stuff will have to be put off. As it is, our house is kind of a free-for-all. My own books are in terrible disarray from a recent move, so I am starting from scratch anyway. :blush: Instruct me! Pictures or links would be great too.

As a person who grew up in the inner city, I can't help but feel a little put off by this. I guess part of the idea is they would see how people who aren't as fortunate as they are live? But on the other hand it sounds like voyeurism on other people's suffering. As a formerly-poor person it makes me feel objectified. Like going on safari to see the wild animals? And what would you really learn from that anyway, other than to view those people as the untouchable Other? If that van drove down my street circa 1985 they might have seen a half-dead, irretrievably alcoholic man lying in the doorway of my building. One would probably figure that any building with THAT on its doorstep must have been some terrible crackhouse or something. What they wouldn't have seen is that every night one of the families in the building, taking turns, would send a kid down to him with a plate of food. The halls in our building were so safe and quiet that we kids constantly got in trouble with the manager if we played around and made noise in them. I wasn't the only honor student who lived there. Most of the families were devout members of a sect that mainstream Christians consider a cult. If you'd gone down there, they'd have tried to convert *you*!:)

I think a big part of the problem is that many just-developing young girls, maybe around age 11-14, *do* look like that. For a short time. I did. And then when they stop looking like that, they think they're "getting fat" and doing something wrong, rather than simply acquiring a more mature shape. And some women continue feeling that way about it their entire lives, because the voices that would tell them different are drowned out.

Only if you define "doing everything right", circularly, as doing what's necessary to be thin, rather than as doing what's necessary to be healthy. There are healthy and unhealthy people at almost every body size. A certain amount of reserves on the body is healthy and protective against disease and there has been some research lately indicating that that amount may be larger than our culture thinks. Different people have different genetic predispositions to store different amounts of fat at the same level of diet/activity. They may also have underlying health conditions that make it more difficult, medications they have to be on which cause weight gain, etc. You can never know the whole story. Why judge people on such a personal matter anyway?

Not everybody is as strong-minded as you, especially the very young, and dismissing those who fall prey to such images as mentally disordered does nothing to allay their suffering. There's also the argument that people of all shapes, sizes, colors, disabilities etc. should be able to see positive depictions of people like themselves in the media to further social inclusion/equality.

This begs the question of why thinness is what is aspired to.

As a woman at the opposite end of the spectrum (size 24/26) I agree with you 100%. The problem isn't fat or thin, the problem is the unspoken assumption that women's bodies are public property for other people to assess and grade. In defense of people who say hurtful things like that, in this society it is hard to be fat (or even just not-skinny) and we are constantly bombarded with messages that we are not good enough. It is more than you may be aware of, since you are not the target of it. So a lot of it is misplaced anger, blaming other women. A lot of it is envy. Also, some of us may have a history of having it lorded over us by thinner or more attractive girls/women in our lives. Not saying you have done this yourself, but the reality is that if society tells one group of people they are more worthy than another, some of them are happy to take advantage of it. None of this makes the hurt you felt about this right, but I hope it makes it understandable. Then you hear things like "it's OK to be a size 0 if you're short but not if you're tall" or "14/16 is one thing, but 24/26 is over the top"... the one possibility that never occurs to anyone is that our bodies are OK because they're our bodies, they exist to help us live our lives, and they don't require anybody else's approval. I learned at a young age to stay away from men AND women who think like that. It would make me crazy to have friends who are always judging and comparing, or Heaven forbid a guy whose love would be conditioned on staying within a certain range. I am happily married and my best friend is a naturally petite, size 2 fitness instructor.

Forgive me if I am out of line as a newbie here but... I grew up in inner-city Los Angeles and saw some pretty rough stuff. But I looked at the CSM website's Los Angeles section and apparently they take the kids to SKID ROW?! Skid Row, IMO, is the kind of place that noone should get anywhere near unless they are a consenting adult who somehow KNOWS they have an individual gift/vocation for assuming the risks of working there. I've known a few people over the years who have dedicated their lives to serving difficult populations and it's truly something from above, not something you can instill on a field trip. {ETA: many of them are big men who have lived that life themselves, then found religion, but can still meet force for force if needed.} I've only ever seen Skid Row from a side street for a few moments and that was enough for a lifetime. It's the kind of place where my parents wouldn't even drive through with the windows up and the car locked, even though it was close to my dad's work. Your car would get approached for drugs, prostitution, somebody begging cigarettes, somebody wanting to squeegee your windshield for money... your car would slow to a crawl as you tried to make your way through the crowd of people. An entire population living on the sidewalk, most of them suffering from untreated psychosis, doing their sex drugs and violence in the open air. It's miles beyond the danger level of even the roughest residential neighborhood. (I know because as mentioned, I lived in one of those neighborhoods.) And now I'm imagining a band of middle-class teenagers, wide-eyed, being escorted in a van, wearing matching t-shirts perhaps? Oh no no no no no. I'm not saying your kid shouldn't go on some kind of trip if that's what serves your faith. But although I don't know the other cities in question, what I read about L.A. made me question the prudence of the people who are running this program. Why not find needy people close to home and commit to serving them on an ongoing basis? Frankly, seeing money get spent on long-distance travel instead of on the actual projects makes me think that the touristy, us-them aspect other posters have mentioned is still lurking in the background somewhere, even if they're not going to Mexico or the Caribbean.

I don't know how sociable your cat is but when we had to leave our very sociable, somewhat emotional Chihuahua, we made sure we had someone coming over who she knew and trusted. I would also consider having the pet stay with a friend, if a suitable situation could be fine. ETA you can bring a pet if you are willing to never leave the car for more than 20 minutes or so if going into a building that doesn't welcome animals, always have one of you be in line of sight of the car (since the windows will be open for the animal's safety), and pay an extra deposit at motels (or sneak the pet in). I have done this, it is a pain in the neck but at the time we judged it worth it to include her. I can't wait for our eventual RV though, and not have these dilemmas.

I'm not interested in asking my husband to rate women but I can tell you from past conversations, his (ahem!) "taste" is cosmopolitan. He also knows nothing about the women's sizing system, and is constantly surprised/incredulous that although we are about the same size, he can buy clothes at most stores and I can't. Outside of the high school/college/young hipster single professional set, I doubt guys are as obsessed with skinniness as the media tells us they are. They may have a superficial preference for it because that's what the media has conditioned them to, they may give lip service to it, but the fact is that if men were really only attracted to skinny women, the human race would die out because there aren't enough of them to go around. I think most people of a certain maturity level understand that you can't expect perfection in everyday life. If anything I think women are harder on our own and each others' bodies because the diet industry has us convinced that it is our fault and under control if we are not thin, which is largely untrue.

Not a guy, and not really secular (Jewish), but Eastern philosophy is HUGE to me. I'm new to this (DD is 3) so I don't really know how I'm going to handle it. I have a global understanding of what "classical" means and the Western tradition emphasizes certain aspects of reality to the dangerous neglect of others. I get really uncomfortable when people act like the Western tradition(s), religious or secular, are the be it and end all. OTOH, Western rationality is a powerful, essential tool and I'm not too sure at what point Eastern concepts of non-duality, etc. become developmentally appropriate. That stuff about permission from husbands is scary. I don't have a problem with people's individual arrangements but I don't think I would be comfortable immersing DD in a social environment where that was standard.

Yes. I have close friends who send their kids to school and I'm a hundred percent supportive even though inwardly I might be cringing. They're smart people and obviously their values are not identical to mine, so what's to be gained by imposing my opinion, as though it would make any difference in such a personal family decision. But I do privately think they are selling their kids short to some extent. Even when relatives or whoever try to needle on the subject, I talk more about subjects I want DD to learn that aren't taught in school and experiences I want her to have, rather than about the academic quality of PS. Keep it positive rather than negative. In the privacy of my own home I am not so Pollyanna-ish about it.

Oh, I certainly didn't take offense or anything. :) It's just that as a new homeschooler myself I thought you might like to hear why one would take on something that's apparently so daunting. If you don't have access to native speakers, it's going to be so difficult that it doesn't matter if the language is "objectively" easy or not. And in my area native speakers of French or Spanish are actually a lot harder to come by. IOW - if you're only just getting a taste of the language anyway, why *not* Chinese?

Paige, I am new here (been lurking for about a week) but I hit on this thread while searching for Mandarin curricula and I felt like I just had to register and post my answer to the question "why Mandarin"? The cultural appeal of China is obvious to any cultured person, so of course there's that, plus the whole geopolitical thing. But I'd always heard that Chinese was impossible to become fluent in unless one started as a child - and since up until recently there weren't really opportunities for Western children to get started, the whole thing seemed moot. What piqued my interest was when my 3 yo dd was watching "Ni Hao, Kai Lan", and she started repeating the Chinese words so accurately that at first I actually found it unsettling. Of course, I'm judging within my own limited ability to distinguish the sounds, as a non-Chinese speaker myself; but she definitely grasps the tonal aspect way better than I can when I try to join in. And I am pleasantly surprised at the resources that are out there these days, so I think we'll give it a shot. I am no stranger to foreign language study and to the difficulties many people have with the idea that a foreign language is *different* and you have to learn to make sounds *differently*. Frankly, the people who wouldn't be able, given adequate instruction by native speakers, to make the sounds correctly enough to be understood probably wouldn't be able to do it in French or Spanish, either. In high school I had a brilliant native speaker French teacher, and after two or three years with her the majority of the class were still making what seemed to me like dumb, obvious mistakes of pronunciation. There are tonal differences between English and French too (albeit relatively slight), and a lot of people can't even reproduce those. As a TA for college-level Latin and Greek, oral fluency wasn't an issue, but again, I had many, many students who just couldn't or wouldn't lay their English aside and really get inside another language. I, for whatever reason, have never had that problem, and whatever her inherent ability turns out to be, I think I can model that openness for dd in a way that promotes success. But I have no illusions of getting my kid beyond vocab and tidbits of conversation before high school. What I can do, though, is take advantage of this early receptivity to the sounds of language, and establish a certain comfort level, cultural exposure, and the personal sense that going further in Mandarin is doable if she wants it. I think it would be a big mistake if someone dealt with the difficulty level of a desired language by putting it off and missing out on that wonderful flexibility in the ears and tongue of a young child. My goal is that by the end of high school, she will be able to read a Chinese newspaper or follow a Mandarin newscast, with the potential to get into real literature etc. at the college level if she wants to. Slow and steady wins the race. If it's true, as I've heard, that one needs about 4,000 characters for basic literacy, that comes out to an average of about 300 a year for the next fourteen years. That's a huge amount, but IMO not impossible. Time will tell! :)