How to show great books study on a transcript?

[WTMCassandra]

Hi, I am designing courses for our first year of high school, which will be next year. I am working on planning our Great Books study, which I intend to do in a pretty "purist" WTM fashion.

 

I know Susan recommends showing World Lit 1 as an elective, English 1 for the grammar and etc., and World History 1.

 

Is this working well for people who are in the trenches of submitting transcripts to colleges?

 

I am writing a course description for each course, and it's a huge pain to split up my course description into the three parts. And part of me wants to show Great Books somehow in my course titles, but maybe that would freak out college adcoms too much. :lol: I know about "Ask the College," but my son will probably do Running Start, and I'm not sure at all what my daughter would do.

 

So, what say ye who are further along in this journey than I am?

[Jane in NC]

This is what I did for my son who is now a first year college student:

 

My son's transcript indicated that he took "English 9 (Ancients), English 10 (Medieval)", etc. Further it reflects in a different section that he studied "History (Ancients), History (Medieval)", etc. I did not give separate credits for Literature and English until 11th grade when my son took a composition class at the CC. Since the norm in NC is to give one high school credit for each semester long course completed via dual enrollment, my son's transcript indicates that he in 11th he completed English 11 (Renaissance/Early Modern) for 1/2 credit and Expository Writing at the CC for 1 credit.

 

In my son's college application ancillary material, I described the philosophy of our homeschool, explaining that we followed many of the ideas put forth in The Well Trained Mind, i.e. exploring a chronological study of history and literature. In the eight page course description document, I listed books used for each class. English courses included grammar, writing, and vocabulary materials as well as literature.

 

Initially I had planned on giving two credits for each combined Great Books class, but after having my conversations with the BTDT crowd, I decided to go a more traditional route with a section of the transcript dedicated to English, another to History.

 

Hope this helps.

 

Jane

[WTMCassandra]

Oooh, I like your solution, Jane! Thank you for sharing!

[LauraQ]

VP's Omnibus is a Great Books program and you might do something like they explain in their grading explanation. They recommend giving one credit each for History, Literature and Religion. Each book is given 10 pts split three ways according to how much they count for each of these (such as 2-4-4 or 7-1-2) that tells you how to distribute the grades for each book. For dd she gets one grade per week per book, plus a quarterly "participation" grade and additional grades for big writing assignments (about 2-4 per quarter). This way, big books that take 4 weeks or more get more grades than shorter, easier books that take less time to complete. I like the way they break things up like that. A book like The Odyssey might be heavy lit, lighter on history, and maybe 0-1 point for religion. A bible book like Matthew would be religion heavy, psalms would also get a good share for lit, and something like kings gets more history points, etc. You could evaluate each book on your own and come up with a similar system. Figuring out which books get how much weight for which subjects seems like a big task, but I think that representing that on paper wouldn't be so hard.

 

If I've completely confused you but you're interested I'll try to explain better ;-)

[Kareni]

This thread has some great examples of course descriptions some of which you might find helpful:

 

Would love to see your "course descriptions"

 

While we did not do a Great Books approach, I'd be happy to email you or others my course descriptions if you'd like to see more examples. Simply send me a personal message with your email address.

 

Regards,

Kareni