I turned to the next index card.
”
Flamboyant,
”
I said to 12-year-old Anne.
”
F-L-A-M-B-OY-A-N-T,
”
she spelled, then squinted slightly.
”
Very showy; strikingly bold,
”
which is exactly what the reverse of the index card read, so I
went on to the next:
”
Innocuous.
”
I turned to the next index card. “Flamboyant,” I said to 12-year-old Anne. “F-L-A-M-B-OY-A-N-T,” she spelled, then squinted slightly. “Very showy; strikingly bold,” which is exactly what the reverse of the index card read, so I went on to the next: “Innocuous.”
Anne had begged to begin rhetoric classes with Debbie Luoma this year. I thought it was a bit young. Oliver had started at 13, Nick at 14 in the very first class Deb had offered to homeschoolers.
Not that Deb was a novice teacher, oh, my, no. She had been teaching in private schools and at community colleges ever since receiving her masters in linguistics 20-odd years ago, as well as homeschooling her own kids, when she first decided to offer a class in rhetoric to homeschoolers.
But what is rhetoric? The word is only used these days in the phrase “a rhetorical question.” In the scholastic tradition, education was broken into three parts. A child would begin with grammar, learning Latin grammar, proceed through the dialectic, learning logic, and culminate this three part study, the trivium, with rhetoric, the art of expressing and defending an opinion.
The homeschooling movement, being diverse, has seen a resurgence of interest in the trivium. A modern day trivium may include nature study and arithmetic in the grammar stage, and algebra and chemistry in the dialectic stage, and essay writing or debate in the rhetoric stage. Debbie intended to teach essay writing.
Truthfully, I didn’t think Nick needed the class. He could write, when he had a mind to. He had passed the CHSPE. But I decided to humor Deb and support her little cottage industry, so Nick bicycled over to her house every Wednesday for the hour and a half class, and came home with assignments.
Initially, Debbie thought that she would only teach composition, having the children write about the great literature and history they were reading at home. But she discovered that some weren’t reading much. So she began to assign literature: Dickens and Shakespeare and Thoreau. After the initial shock, the students discovered they enjoyed discussing literature.
Every week, Debbie would assign essays. She marked up the essays with copious comments: commas, spelling, parallel structure. But the essays showed no improvement from week to week, and at last she decided desperate remedies were called for. She began to award letter grades.
Nick’s next essay was handed back to him with a big fat C- on it. He slipped it into his backpack and never mentioned it at home. But he read the comments. And his next essay earned him a B-. And within a month, while helping himself to black bean chili, he remarked, with pseudo nonchalance, “I got an A- on my essay today.”
“Good job!” said his dad.
“Very good job!” I said. “Debbie’s a tough grader.”
Deb’s enrollment grew year by year; she now teaches 60 students in five classes, from Anne’s class, Backgrounds in Literature, to her newest endeavor, AP English Language and Compostition/ AP American History, Oliver’s class.
Anne enjoys her class thoroughly. She loves reading the books – well, all except Ben Franklin’s Autobiography. She likes learning about alliteration and assonyance, rhyme and meter, metaphor and simile. She enjoys mastering her vocabulary words and seeing the steady improvement in her essays. And she loves the independence of yelling, “Bye, Mom,” and slamming the door behind her.
Oliver’s literary course has been quite different, because everything about Oliver – hair, clothes, art, room, and essays – has to be unmistakably Oliver. Communication took a back seat to artistic integrity. A thesis sentence had to be bizarre, abstruse, and witty, and if the reader couldn’t understand it, she wasn’t trying.
But with that double AP whammy looming before him, he has abruptly decided to communicate about John Jay and the Articles of Confederation. It’s still definitely Oliver’s essay, but it’s clear as well as concise, informative as well as witty.
While considering the alleged drawbacks of teaching to the test, we should remember that sometimes a student might decide to learn to a test – for college credit, or for glory. In that case, and if the test is a good one, teaching and learning to a test can be very good indeed.
