Classical Education...your success stories

[Elena]

I am super new to homeschooling. In fact, I haven't even started yet. We will probably start in one month. I own TWTM and do like very much what I read in it, so I think this is the route we will take. However, I would like to hear from WTM veterans. Now that TWTM has been in circulation for 10 years, I would love to hear your success stories. Who has used it since it first came out? Who has graduated their children using it for a good number of their homeschooling years? Any other success stories? Please share.

[usetoschool]

We had been trying to implement a classical/trivium method since we started homeschooling in 1991. The Well Trained Mind pulled together all of the straggling pieces and made it work - not to mention pointing to some great curriculum resources that we have been using since.

 

My oldest daughter will graduate from college in the spring and has mentioned several times how much more prepared for college she was than most of her peers. She is an average hard working child but has maintained mostly A's because she was already familiar and trained in most of what they were teaching as far as core courses. She is going to a state, not private, university, so most of their first year is remedial and not a good indicator, but she managed to keep up the A level throughout college. There was some controversy over the high school proficiency exam when she was "graduating" from high school - that is was to hard and unfair but when she took it she said it was a joke and she aced the whole thing. Like I said, she is not a genius child, just an average hard worker but I think because we stuck with a classical education from the start she was well prepared and educated. It was definately not me! Just a good curriculum, time tested ideas and steadily plugging away at it. The rest of my kids are having the same experience. I don't think besting the public schools is necessarily our goal, we want to be as educated as we can be, but a basic classical education will beat the public schools in our state any time. :rolleyes: I often complain to my kids that many colleges have just become job/citizen training centers (my son complains regularly about all of the group projects they have to do and says he came to learn from the teacher about the subject, not from his less educated peers about how to work in a group and grade each others assignments :banghead:). I think many people do well with a classical education because it actually educates you and teaches you to think, wrather than just filling your head with tools for a career. Hmmm, need a $.02 smiley...

[arcara]

I'll chime in, even though this is our 1st year using TWTM. For the 4 years before this, we used a boxed, traditional, workbook curriculum. I can say that my kids and I are really enjoying school much more this year. My kids love doing lots of experiments in science - before we just read from a text. They love SOTW and reading lots of library books to go along with history - again, we just read from a text. Also, we had so many other workbooks to get through in other subjects that we rarely got around to history and science. They are enjoying reading real books instead of "readers." My oldest dd's writing has really improved with narration, instead of creative writing - type writing and book reports. She used to get frustrated, say she couldn't do it, that she couldn't remember what to write, and often would cry. Now, she actually writes more and doesn't get stressed about it. She may not love writing all the time, but there are no more tears! We've also implemented daily free reading time, and it's made my kids love reading so much more.

 

There's plenty more I could add. Classical education has been a huge sucess around here!

[WTMCassandra]

Midpoint success: You can see the ages of my children below. We are at the midpoint. I have used WTM all the way through, and my children are really taking off in their writing. They are able to write outlines and short papers without much mental effort (the handwriting can still be slow). They have a grasp of the overall flow of history and how Christian history fits in with everything else. They are readers and thinkers and we have a print-centered home, not a "screen centered" home. They find ways to apply their Latin study daily. Their "fun" reading is very often classics that other students study in school, like Caddie Woodlawn. Shhhhh, don't tell. They are having a good time (we are not depriving or oppressing them). They are bright and inquisitive, and they enjoy relating to people of all ages. I think homeschooling and WTM are proving to be a good path for us.

[Colleen in NS]

I am super new to homeschooling. In fact, I haven't even started yet. We will probably start in one month. I own TWTM and do like very much what I read in it, so I think this is the route we will take. However, I would like to hear from WTM veterans. Now that TWTM has been in circulation for 10 years, I would love to hear your success stories. Who has used it since it first came out? Who has graduated their children using it for a good number of their homeschooling years? Any other success stories? Please share.

 

You might also post this over on the high school board. It's not as busy there as here, but you will find people there who have been using WTM for 10 years and their wonderful stories (of course, some of those people check this board, too, obviously, and will reply here, but there are others there who I don't think check here, who you probably would enjoy hearing from over there - how's that for confusing?? :) ). I have been soooooo encouraged and inspired by them (and many people on all of the boards here) for the past 5 years.

 

I'm 5 years into the "WTM experiment" and have no regrets at all. Just before my oldest started grade 1, I had NO CLUE how to organize his education. I'd taught him to read, and that was it. I'd read all the homeschooling books I could find in the library for years, yet none of them laid out a clear plan to me like WTM did. I've been using most of this plan (oldest is in grade 5 right now) since then, and I'm continually amazed that *I,* with the help of a book full of logical methods and good resources, am actually educating my kids with skills they will need for the rest of their lives. I never, ever dreamed I could do this. Between two kids, we do math, grammar, Latin, writing, spelling, cursive, chronological history reading/writing, one-science-per-year reading/writing/experimenting, and I try to get art/music skills/appreciation in there as much as possible.

 

I don't have a grad. success story yet, but here is something that happened the other day. We were at the pool, and another lady was there with her two kids that she just started homeschooling last Oct. after years in the p.s. system. She told me that while her 6th grade son was in p.s. at the beginning of this school year, he asked her how to multiply 2 digit numbers by 2 digit numbers (she took him out partly to teach him the math he was not being taught). My son quietly sat there listening and I know he was shocked and thinking how far past that he is able to do. I told him later on, "see, you are much better off learning with me, and that boy will be much better off learning from his Mom, too - now he'll finally have math taught to him." I guess the "success" part of that is that my son saw that he is steadily building his math skills (he also knows more grammar than I did at his age, as well as a myriad of other things - he has far outread me for his age, and he can think TONS more clearly than I ever did all through high school and early adulthood!).

 

Good luck and have fun!

[Colleen in NS]

re-raising. I'd love to hear more stories.

[Laura Corin]

If it makes sense we are a rigorous, high-reading, high-foreign-language-including-Latin, lowish-English-grammar family. A couple of months ago, we went to discuss home education law with our member of parliament and he and Calvin had a fun discussion about who is the greatest hero in The Iliad. It was clear that the MP was impressed by C's knowledge and his ability to put it across.

 

Then, a few days ago, C met an English professor at the local university, who has a daughter of the same age as C. They didn't talk about anything very substantive, but she commented about how much more able C was to talk in an adult 'register', rather than lapsing into teenage speak, just because he spends so much more time with adults.

 

Best wishes

 

Laura

[Nan in Mass]

I'm rather in a hurry at the moment, but we've been using it for 8 years (with adaptations for our own particular children). Here is a post I wrote just a minute ago that says a bit of how we feel about it. http://www.welltrainedmind.com/forums/showthread.php?p=1247855&posted=1#post1247855

We love it and have found that it has been very successful for our family.

-Nan

[Nan in Mass]

TWTM leaves room for my children to develop their own ideas. It doesn't tell them what to think about everything. It doesn't answer all their questions leaving them nothing to mull over, wonder about, or research further. If a curriculum tells you what to think about something, there is no reason to think about it. You also miss out on the satisfaction of figuring things out. Yes, with TWTM my children might miss some of the conventional interpretations of thing or some bits of general knowledge, but who is to say that those interpretations or bits are better than the ones my children choose for themselves? There is a lot of knowledge out there. I think they should be able to have some choice as to which bits they focus on. Mine are interested and curious, even as teenagers. I'll take that any day over the apathy of their ps friends. When we read Plato's Republic, our discussions were often dragged in gymnastics. Star Trek shows up frequently when we discuss literature. They focus on aspects of what they are learning that are of interest to them. And yet the system of using spines or general question sets keeps them from being too lopsided or narrow in their focus.

 

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What does a WTM day look like for my 9th grader?

He gets up and sits down to his math. I correct his homework, read the next math lesson with him, work the problems, and assign problems for him to do before bed. Then we get out his French and do it together orally and I assign him one of the excersizes to do in writing. (He can speak but not write French, so we are working on that in the "nibbled to death by ducks" fashion recommended for learning to write English by TWTM.) Next we work on Latin. We're having a heavy French year, so we are doing this in a lighter fashion. He's gotten to the point where we are doing a Latin reader that has original passages of Latin in it. The focus mostly is on reading Latin, with a little bit of grammar review. Then he takes a break and gets some breakfast. (He isn't hungry when he first wakes up.) After break, we do great books. He's read about Mesapotamia in his history spine already and made a historical context page for Gilgamesh, and now we are reading Gilgamesh aloud together. I am encouraging him to write comments in the book as we go. Afterwards, we will discuss it some more using a general set of literature questions. We've used the same questions lots of times so as we read, he will be keeping an eye out for things related to the questions. This set of questions produces some great discussions for us. Then he'll write a paper on something he is interested or noticed. He'll pick the topic, perhaps with suggestions from me. But for now, we're at the fun stage of just reading the story. Then comes lunch. After lunch, he goes outside and draws something for his nature journal. He'll look it up on the internet or in one of our reference books and make notes about it. Then he'll read his science book. After that, he'll work on his robotix project. Then he'll play piano for half an hour. School is now officially out, but he often will continue with piano or robotix a bit longer. Then he'll play for an hour or so. Then he'll go off to gymnastics team practice. After practice, he eats a big bowl of icecream and does his homework. Then he climbs into bed and reads for a few minutes (whatever he likes) and goes to sleep.

 

That is where we are at at the moment. We've had years when we worked on writing in English more, and ones where we've spent lots of time on science. We've had years when we were driving an older child to the community college for a few classes, where we sat in the sun with chocolate milk and tea and did our math surrounded by other students. We've had years when a child was absent for a few months traveling. We've had years when Latin took two hours a day. (I am a horrible Latin teacher and we have horrible memories.) At the moment, though, this is what a school day looks like.

 

-Nan

[OnTheBrink]

I started using WTM when my son was in 10th grade. We started homeschooling him at 9th grade--that first year was a mishmash of frustration!

 

Anyway, when we started WTM methods, he was in the rhetoric stage and TWTM was a perfect fit for him, with the way he thinks and learns. Before reading TWTM, I had no idea about teaching Latin, or logic, or having him read different philosophers and compare their views. When he got to college, he was very well prepared for many of his courses, and that's because he followed TWTM recommendations for the rhetoric stage.

 

For my dd, my approach is different, but she's a very different child from my son and I found that trying to stick with the WTM was an uphill fight. So, not every thing works for every child. :)

[Guest Terence01]

Good to know some of your success stories. Homeschooling really works for some children. It is good to know some of the methods followed by you all.