Wittenberg Gate

This and That

Welcome New Readers!

If you are new to Wittenberg Gate, be sure to check out the Favorite Posts on the left sidebar. Thanks to Michelle Malkin for her kind words and for sending lots of folks my way today.

Civil Rights Legislation Breaks New Ground

Be sure to read Joshua Clayborn of In the Agora on new civil rights legislation in Illinois. He says:

What makes Illinois unique is that unlike most municipal prohibitions on sexual orientation discrimination, Illinois does not expressly exempt religious organizations from their coverage. What does this mean, practically speaking? The bill may very well compel religious organizations to set aside convictions about homosexuality when hiring clergy and other staff.

Read the whole post here. I wonder why we haven't heard more of this story.

Curriculum Adjustment

Homeschool at our house has had a change of lesson plans for the last two days. All other lessons have been set aside in favor of some real-life economics lessons. So far we have learned:

* Letting potential customers know of your service shortly before they need it (in our case once the weather report predicted snow, but before the storm started) gives you a jump on the competition.

* Hard work brings financial rewards.

* Doing a very good job results in repeat business (in this case after the second round of the storm).

* Being faithful when there is little accountability (in this case the uninhabited house that was to be kept looking lived in), brings trust and repeat business.

* Kindness in the name of Christ (helping the widowed and the infirmed without pay) needs no financial reward.

Sometimes snow shovels teach more than textbooks.

Are You a PCA Blogger?

David Wayne of JollyBlogger is starting an aggregator site for blogs written by folks who are members of PCA churches and in agreement with the Westminster Standards. If that's you, stop by his site and let him know of your interest.

The PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) is a small denomination, but we sure have a lot of bloggers! I'm meeting more every day. Many are pastors, many are laymen, and a lot of us are ladies. I guess the Internet is a medium that suits the typical Presbyterian approach to the Scriptures...analyze, systematize, then get it down in writing! (A great approach, I think, as long as we remember to live it out.)

Your World View Will Be Curtailed

So how would you feel if your county education director said this about home schooling families?

...you and your children are not living in isolation on some island but rather in an environment posing intra- and extracurricular situations where you'll have to accept that your world view will be curtailed...children should not be encapsulated or kept apart from the outside world. In these cases, the parents' rights to personally educate their children would prevent the children from growing up to be responsible individuals within society…

Unfortunately this is not something from a futuristic political horror novel. This is Germany 2005. Thirteen Christian children will either have to attend public school today, or they may face being removed from the parents' homes and placed into government custody. Click here to learn more from the HSLDA on the plight of these seven Christian homeschooling families in Germany.

Daily Bible Reading

Experienced homeschooling mom Cindy has a helpful post on her Dominion Family site on encouraging a habit of daily Bible reading in ourselves and in our children. She shares several methods she's used over the years.

Homeschooling High School: How to Read a Book

I know, I know, reading a book about how to read a book seems oxymoronic, but Mortimer J. Adler's classic How To Read A Book, revised with Charles Van Doren, is a must-read for families homeschooling high schoolers, or for anyone interested in self-education and getting more out of their reading. (Here are links to the Christianbook.com and Amazon.com pages for this book.)

In an earlier post, I described the type of research that high school students in the rhetoric stage of their education ought to be equipped to do. This book teaches the reading skills necessary for this level of research.

Adler describes four levels of reading. After reading this book for the first time, I realized I was only thoroughly accomplishing the first level: Elementary Reading, that is, decoding what the text says. Just sitting down and reading a book cover to cover is Elementary Reading. The second level Adler describes is Inspectional Reading. This is something I had learned something about in school, but Adler has systematized this type of reading, as he does the others, by explaining the goals of skimming, and how to do a thorough inspection of a book. Homeschoolers should be sure their middle school students have mastered these skills. They can be introduced in late elementary school.

The bulk of How to Read a Book addresses the third level of reading, which Adler calls Analytical Reading. Again Adler's approach is very systematic.

Homeschooling High School: Family History Project Idea

The Fifth Commandment tells us to honor our fathers and our mothers. We are often told to remember the wonderful works of God in history. What better idea, then, for a history project for our homeschoolers than a family history project? When carried out for these reasons, rather than a false sense of family pride, family history research can be an interesting and edifying experience for rhetoric stage students. It can introduce them to the tools of the historian in an interesting way, give them the joy of discovery and a real sense of their place in history.

There are several reasons that make this type of project ideal for homeschoolers. First, the information is, in most cases, not available by simply reading another person’s work. Perhaps your family has some lines that have already been researched and published, but there are other lines that are waiting for your budding historian to discover them. This forces the student to go to primary and secondary sources to piece together a history.

Researching your family history will give your student experience with the tools of the historian, including conducting interviews, examining documents, keeping records, making timelines and charts, and carefully recording sources. It will also give him or her the experience with organizing the information and presenting it in an interesting way. If you happen to live near the area where your ancestors lived, the project can also include visiting and photographing tombstones, family home sites, and churches. It will also give your student a lot of experience with using search engines, including overcoming obstacles such as variously spelled or misspelled names, misread handwriting, use of nicknames, changing county and state borders, and the like.

Perhaps the most important lesson will be learning to evaluate the weight of evidence obtained.

Homeschooling High School: Rhetoric Stage Research

You can’t possibly teach your kids, in the time you have them, everything they ought to know. They’ve got a lifetime to learn. Before they leave home, though, they do need to learn how to learn. The Classical education model separates learning into three stages: grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Each stage has its own set of learning tools and skills. Even if you are not using the Classical method to homeschool your children, it is helpful to review these stages in order to plan what learning skills your children will need.

During the grammar phase of learning something new, you must learn a new vocabulary, learn some basic rules, and memorize lots of facts. Young children seem to be wired for this, and so early education emphasizes this type of learning. Even an adult, though, learning a new subject, must first learn that subject’s grammar—no matter how difficult that is for us old folks. (Ask me sometime about a forty-something-year-old frumpy housewife struggling to learn Greek.)

During the logic phase, one learns the structure of a subject—how it is organized, what the parts are and how they relate to one another. At this stage the information starts to become useable. The skills of this stage include logic and organization of information. In the logic phase we learn not only the facts, but why things work they way do, or why things happened the way they did. We learn to weigh opinions and understand different perspectives. Children are developmentally ready for an emphasis on this kind of learning somewhere around their early teens.

The final phase of learning is the rhetoric stage. At this stage the subject matter is not only useful to you, but you are able to contribute original material to the field. A real scientist doesn’t just know a lot of science; he is able to conduct research and he is able to analyze and communicate the results of that research. The same is true of every field. The basic tools of the rhetoric stage are research, analysis, and communication. By age 16 or sometimes a little earlier, students should be developmentally ready to do some original research.

Often what are called, “research papers” in high school programs are really logic stage research rather than rhetoric stage research. At the logic stage a student may gather information from many sources and organize it into a paper or project, but add little, if any, original conclusions to it. Stating which prevailing opinion one favors and defending that position is not original research, though such projects are very appropriate for logic-stage students and should be included in middle and high school curricula.

Deut. 4:9 Lest they depart...

A teacher in California was prohibited from giving his students copies of the Declaration of Independence and other historical documents because they referenced God.

A Maryland school district ruled that the history of the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving will be taught with any references to God or Christianity forbidden.

Dear Christian brothers and sisters, are YOUR children still in the government schools?

Gary DeMar on Christian Education

Tonight I was blessed to hear Gary DeMar of American Vision speak at a local Classical Christian school. DeMar is a prolific writer on a wide range of topics that could be summed up by “applied Christian worldview.” His God and Government, a 3-volume work, is a classic on understanding the historical and Biblical basis for government.

DeMar was an engaging speaker. He challenged us to not settle for education that is merely better than the government schools, but to not stop working until the education we provide for our children is the best possible—even though that may not happen in this generation or the next.

He noted that Christians need to think multi-generationally. If we put our children in Christian schools just to keep them safe until the Lord returns, we will be satisfied with mediocrity. However, if we have a long-term vision of our children and our grandchildren laboring for the Lord and discipling the nations and transforming culture by taking every thought captive to Christ, we will be motivated to build schools and homeschools that equip our children for that task. Wow.

Tackling Aristotle

We have these great leather love seats in the family room. They're as comfortable as all get out. I was stretched out across one this afternoon and my son, 13, was stretched out across the other. He stretches out further than I do now, and while that is hardly a great accomplishment, it is a landmark nonetheless--a landmark he enjoys more than I do.

We were reading Aristotle's Poetics aloud to each other. (His humanities course this year is George Grant's Gileskirk program, Antiquities, and I like to tie in his literature to his history.) Why read it aloud? Well, one reason is that my goals for his education exceed what mine was, and I haven't read it before. So why not read it together and help each other out?

Besides, he might need my help with the vocabulary.

Mom: "Now his use of the word trajectory here is not in the sense of..."…

Son: "I know, Mom, he means the movement of history."

Mom: "Right. Very good, now where was I..."