Finished first semester of Logic and Composition - just over 20 days!!

I did a weeks' worth of work each day - reducing the 20 week courses to just about 20 DAYS!! That's a semester of schoolwork folks -- in THREE WEEKS!!! And I took almost no days off during that time - when you're going for a short defined period like 3 weeks you can go really hard and take time off after the work is done, making for much greater productivity and focused work.

I'm surprised at how well I remembered the early parts of the Logic course - I thought those would escape my memory after so much time. But I was able to remember the functional parts pretty well - though I didn't fare so well on the pure memorization of non-essentials like the names of all the various Rules, Laws, Dictums, and descriptions. I don't really see the importance of remembering what all those things are called though, as long as you can perform them properly - THAT'S the important part.

Ultimately it doesn't matter if I can remember all that stuff, because I'm going to make myself a pocket-sized Logic Handbook, consisting of those parts I couldn't memorize. Armed with my Logic Handbook nestled under my wallet, I'll be able to do logic anytime, anywhere, until eventually I'll have it committed to memory well enough I won't need the book anymore.

I feel like doing all 20 lessons of the Progymnasmata (the Composition course) was overkill - I only needed about half as much, so going forward I'm planning to only do every other lesson, reducing it to 10 days per semester. If my math holds true, at this rate I should be able to finish the remaining 8 books of the Progymnasmata - 4 years' worth of lessons - in 3 months. If all goes according to plan, that's by the end of the year! Though including some time off and possible setbacks, most likely early 2017. By which time I'll also be done with the rest of the Logic courses, Rhetoric and all the other homeschooling material I ordered alongside it - the grammar and poetry.

Taking the rest of September off as a well deserved reward/vacation!

WHY am I studying the Trivium?

By following the same course of eduction that produced the great thinkers of history and all my favorite writers up until the 20th century, I put down my roots in the same soil they grew from - drink deep of the same nutritional matrix. All those writers I've been rhapsodizing about - with all their eloquence, power and clarity - I now walk the same paths they did.  But mine is an abbreviated version of the full classical curriculum - without Latin or Greek, and of necessity I'm not absorbing all the same literature they did. Though I will be getting quite a bit of that (and most of it free thanks to Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and Google Books!)

My reading into the classical Liberal Arts has convinced me that it was their education that forged the common links between all those thinkers - the artists, the authors, the natural scientists and philosophers, the poets, the statesmen and the critics. They all received the same training, all read the same classic works of the great Western tradition. And really that might be the main key to it all - the literature.

Reading the greatest works of the Western canon is not at all like reading the majority of today's books - much of it documents the authors' very honest struggles with the deepest and most profound ideas to ever grace human thought. And no, they didn't always get it right, but sometimes their failures make for some great comic relief. It seems authors and artists of all stripes have stopped even attempting to navigate those hallowed waters over the last century or so, doesn't it? Today instead we get an endless parade of very minor issues, and a whole lot of extremely divisive political posturing that actually blocks any real attempt to deal with the issues themselves. As a culture we seem to have grown too small to deal with the great ideas and the great problems. Too small, too self-fixated, too materialistic. And make no mistake - WE'VE BEEN TRAINED INTO IT!

And trained out of dealing with the big ideas. Out of the ability to understand ideas without passing premature judgement on them - to consider them critically and with great clarity, and then to formulate an intelligent response and deliver it powerfully and persuasively. Aka Grammar, Logic and Rhetoric.

Pre 20th century rhetoric is at the same time more rational and more poetic than our own stripped-down plainspeak, which is materialistic and utilitarian and for many of us is on about a valley girl level or a Bill & Ted level.

I want to tune in to the Great Conversation of the classical Western tradition! Ponder the deep thoughts of Homer, Aristotle, Plato - Shakespeare, Leibniz and Spinoza. Spending some time immersed in those deep waters, if you've prepared yourself to understand what's being said, you can't help but emerge wiser or at least thinking intelligently about much more important issues. 

More Bookses (my precious!)

New arrivals.

The new reference library. I got tired of buying expensive bookends that were never quite heavy enough and also very fragile if dropped. That problem is easily remedied by the simple expedient of bricks! This will make a very solid foundation for my expanding knowledge-base and worldview.

Halfway through Logic 1 already!!!

I realized it with a bit of a shock this morning - I'm just about halfway there! And it's been - without checking (and considering my notorious inability to estimate time-chunks) slightly over a week? Need to check back on that. Yeppers. Saturday - August 27th - was my first Trivium post, with a pic of my newly-arrived homeschooling books all laid out. I think that was the day they came in and I launched into my studies.

And here I was, afraid this was going to take a couple of years or something! Well, other parts of it still might, though I'm making some massive progress through Composition (the Progymnasmata) as well - 1/2way through book 1 - Fables (but the Progymnasmata consists of 9 books, and some of the others are much thicker).

This is the first day I've taken off from studying - well, sort of. First I reviewed yesterday's lesson and realized it needs a little more time to settle in before I move on - there's danger of it coming apart if I try to nail anything new onto it just now. So rather than do the next lesson I read the rest of the book - just an initial read-through to develop a little familiarity with the concepts. This is an extremely helpful practice - makes it clear exactly why you need to learn each part along the way. You can see how it all fits together.

And how it's all fitting together is brilliant!!! It's apparent already this will develop ultimate clarity of thought and expression. Which in fact is precisely the goal of Aristotle's logic.

Stinky Boot

This is just about making me sick right now. WHY is my approach always to start indiscriminately scribbling all over really fast, hoping to see things come together - and then when they don't I just keep on scribbling, sort of with my eyes unfocused or something, like the way I used to draw. The difference - it works in drawing, I guess because of long familiarity. And the worst part - even when I stop and get a grip and say "Ok, I need to get this clearly blocked out in terms of lights and darks, create some definite form to organize it" -- then I go right back in and start scribbling like a madman on speed again. It would work for surface details and blending - after establishing a good crisp value design. I need to force myself to do that part. And I should probably start in greyscale. I really need to get it together dammit - I guess this is the price for not having painted in so long.

Ok, it's coming together sloooowly. So frustrating - doing this reminded me that just abut every time I've done a painting, I went through this same thing. It usually starts off a total mess, and then I have to spend countless hours trying to fix it until eventually I start to hammer out something salvageable. The only time it isn't like this is when I'm working from a photo and I pretty much copy it exactly, almost creating a paint by numbers kit - literally outlining the areas for shadows or different colors. It's supposed to start with a simple, foolproof method that blocks things out neatly (and doesn't involve endless, mindless scribbling!) And there's something in me that rebels against the highly methodical, almost assembly line method that suggests. But then, flailing around desperately like a drowning man is hardly an artistic triumph, is it? I need to start methodically and simply, and leave the artistic flourishes for later.

Well, maybe by the time I'm done making something decent of this boot, I'll be back in the swing and ready to get into some serious painting!

* * * 

Damn -- looking back and forth between both images, I see all I've done is smooth some things out and blend out any character it had, as well as that spontaneous and powerful look of an early render. 

Flailing... flailing.. 

Back to the top of the stack...

The new arrivals. I need the Philosopher's Toolkit to prepare me for the Intro to Kant's Aesthetics, so I can then wade in and attempt to read Kant, though I understand that's not an easy task.

As before, here is my Kindle list:

.. And I can't resist posting this:

I think this is the most-loved, most heavily used, and most cherished book I own or have ever seen. I don't mean by me - I mean apparently by a lot of people who have owned it before me, or possibly just one who did a lot of marking up on it! But no - it must be several - there is writing in many different kinds of ink and in pencil, done in very different hands. This is obviously the kind of book that inspires deeply.

My approach to The Trivium - Into the nitty gritty

Morning Study Mode

3 days ago my first shipment of homeschooling materials arrived from Memoria Press - Traditional Logic 1 and the first 3 lessons of the Progymnasmata (Pro-gym-NOZZ-muh-tuh), which is the classical Composition course (writing). It was a twofold test - first to see how worthy I deem Memoria's materials for my purposes of self-education, and second to see if my obsession for this stuff holds fast when it comes to actual study rather than just reading about it. Passed with flying colors on both counts!

Let me back up a little and explain the purpose of this post - what I hope to do is clarify the nitty gritty  details on exactly how I'm approaching this and why.

This all began when I discovered the book The Trivium by Sister Miriam Joseph. Instantly my imagination and my undying interest were captivated - I knew in a flash this is something I need to pursue and it immediately takes first precedence in my life, at least until it's become a settled routine. I believe in a previous post I mentioned that - excellent as the book is, it doesn't work for me as educational material, which I was hoping it would. It reads more like a fast moving and very stern lecture on what the Trivium is, but isn't laid out well for study. While she actually does explain in great detail essentially every aspect of the curriculum, and even gets into loads of specifics, it all moves too fast, while at the same time being way too densely packed with information.

I could possibly have used it as study material, but it would have meant breaking it down into proper form for daily studies -- summaries, review questions, quizzes, tests. That's the stuff that makes you remember it all. So I would have had to turn it into a workbook and a lesson plan. And I actually considered doing that, but it just felt like an insanely difficult task, especially the finding more complete explanations for everything part. I'd much rather spend the time learning than creating an educational program.

About that time I started running across homeschooling courses like Memoria Press, and realized this is exactly what I need - already broken down neatly into digestible form. I decided to lay out some cash - an investment in my own education.

Which brought up the inevitable next question - how much cash?

This is where I started making some quick intuitive decisions. If I were still in my 20s, maybe even my 30s, I might go whole hog and immerse myself into many years of training. But it's well past that point now - that would be unnecessary and even ridiculous, considering I already have the basics of grammar and rhetoric. What exactly should my criteria be then?

Well, I know I want the whole Logic course. That's the part that's been entirely expunged from modern public schooling, and is the vital core of it all really. And since I'd be learning it from scratch, having no background in it (aside from the reading I've since done - more on that in a bit), then I felt I should buy what Memoria calls the Basic Set, which includes the student guide, the textbook, and the teacher's guide. One of my earliest decisions was not to get any DVDs - I believe they're mainly just spoken introductions, like "Hi kids, what we're going to be covering today.. " as well as probably some duplication of material in the books. And not surprisingly, the DVDs are the most expensive part.

I do want the teacher's guides for Logic, because I feel it's essential that I learn this correctly. It's different when it comes to grammar and rhetoric and composition - that stuff has more leeway and nobody expects them to be precise anymore. They're more about artistic expression, and Logic is more about precision in thinking, so I consider the teacher's guides for Logic necessary.

I've placed my second order now, much larger than the first, rounding out the entire Logic course (Traditional Logic I & II and Material Logic), the single-book Aristotle's Rhetoric course (which is a guided stroll through Aristotle's own book on the subject, with those better explanations I'm looking for, along with the all-important summaries, review questions, quizzes and tests), and the 4 volume set of Grammar lessons. No teacher's guides for any of these. The teacher's guides are more expensive than the student workbooks, so this represents a substantial savings.

Besides these, I've also opted for a few literature and poetry lessons. For these there is generally a text (a Shakespeare play, or Treasure Island for example), as well as a student workbook and teacher's guide/answer key. In many cases I've been able to locate the texts on Project Gutenberg for free and downloaded them, saving a few more Drachma. In the case of Shakespeare I am getting teacher's guides, because I don't trust that just by studying the material I can always find the correct answers. And rather than download Shakespeare from Gutenberg, I'm getting it from No Fear Shakespeare on Sparknotes, which thankfully supplies a modern translation beside the original tongue-and-brain-twisting text.

I've always wanted to be able to understand Shakespeare - to the extent that I bought 2 Complete Works (the first was printed in such fine text on such tissue-thin paper it was completely impossible to read) and an Asimov's Guide, which is probably excellent, but unfortunately does not guide how I need guided - through just what the heck it all MEANS! So now, between Sparknotes and Memoria Press, my dream of understanding The Bard is approaching realization at long last.

And finally - the Pre-Soak.

While exploring the Memoria Press site and gradually developing the plan for what I need to order, and then while waiting for it to arrive, I sought out and devoured many PDFs, web articles, and books about traditional logic and rhetoric. Including many of the original sources -- translations of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian among others. I didn't try to understand it all on these initial read-throughs, rather I considered it all a mental pre-soak, just immersing my mind deeply into the subjects and letting it simmer in the stew for a while. Now I find as I burn through the lessons (often 2 or 3 days' worth in a single sitting) comprehension dawns more easily because of it. All in all I'd say a very excellent approach to this arcane and yet essential curriculum.