In honor of Independence Day, Alana works through the first two sentences of the Declaration of Independence. Above all, I want to normalize working through difficult prose to work towards understanding. Part of that is developing the habit of breaking it apart into smaller units as needed.
Note how different this kind of reading is as compared to simple narrative reading, as in reading a grade level appropriate story or news article. I find that as students develop the habit of working through difficult material, then they learn to understand and enjoy conceptually difficult material at a much younger age than is the norm. This opens up the world of ideas for them -and incidentally leads to significant SAT verbal gains. I predict that Alana will easily score above SAT 600 verbal in high school and almost certainly above 700 by her senior year without trying. To get to an 800 a bit of focus on test taking is sometimes useful.
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“If I were living anywhere near one of your schools, that’s where I would send my kids, because that is the closest approximation to what I did with Laura, and maybe a much better environment, because there are other kids around. The way that you do education is pretty much the way I did education with Laura, except that you are a pro.”
- Homeschooling father of Laura Deming, matriculated at MIT at 14, left MIT to accept a Thiel Fellowship at 16, and who by 20 was a leading anti-aging VC.
Socratic educator Michael Strong, author of The Habit of Thought, models how to engage your child in a conversation about ideas so that they develop curiosity and the habit of thought.