A Commonplace Book: Beginning

As a middle aged woman with a career as an educator behind me, both an undergraduate and Master's degree in my possession and four children at various stages of home school education, I expected that self-education was something I'd checked off my list of things to do.  Frankly, it never really occurred to me that a purposeful, systematic course of self-education was valuable nor  timely.  I was educated, past tense and didn't need to worry about my own learning.  My purpose at this stage was to focus on the education of my children.  Dealing with the day to day was the height of my personal expectation.  Laundry, dishes and meal preparation took up most of my time.  Providing reading instruction, basic mathematics, history and science at a grammar or logic level occupied most of my attention.

This year, I embarked on the task of providing a rhetoric stage education to my high school age student.  As I read through the list of recommended reading and reviewed the topics to be studied I realized that my own education, while adequate for success in the modern world, was not up to this task. 

When I began homeschooling my children, a friend recommended The Well Trained Mind by Jessie Wise and Susan Wise Bauer as a starting point.  The method and reasoning struck a chord with me and classical education is the choice for our homeschooling.  We set about creating life long learners, teacher included.  As I realized the limitations of my own education when providing a rhetoric stage education I turned, once again, to Peace Hill Press and found The Well-Educated Mind by Susan Wise Bauer. 

My daughter and I began our high school adventure a few weeks ago.  In preparation, I gathered resources, wrote syllibi and re-read the most pertinent parts of both books mentioned above along with several other homeschooling high school references, web sites and forums.  We waded into physical science, medieval history and literature, Latin and algebra. 

Now that we've made a start and I've found a bit of breathing room, I thought it would be helpful to go back and read more carefully.  And that, is how I came to this place at this time.  The Well-Educated Mind recommends that part of reading is keeping a journal.  My most successful journal to date has been my blog.  Granted, I've kept it for less than a year.  However, I think my previous forty years of journals might record a week of consistent entries, then a week or perhaps two of inconsistent entries, then nothing.  My blog has been a much more consistent endeavor.  I've made entries more or less bi-weekly for over eight months.  That kind of success is worth repeating so I've created this new blog as my journal of self-education. 

In chapter 3, Bauer refers to the journal as an expanded "commonplace book" to be used as a place to record what is read, summarize it and reflect upon it. In this commonplace blog, that is exactly what I intend to do.  And so, we begin.