Email from 10-30-12:

Dear Friends,

This is the last email I will be sending with a blind copy, as we decided at our first meeting that we'd like to communicate with each other via email and a blog that Helen Sullivan will be setting up. I am also beginning to receive emails with articles and websites to share with each other and I'd love for us all to be able to share those directly with each other instead of them all going through me first. If you do not wish for others in the group to have your information, please let me know by the end of this week and I'll remove you from our list. If you do that, however, please know that you will no longer receive notifications, readings, writings, applications, access to the blog, or harrassment from me. Also, if there are others you know who would wish to join us, reel them in!!! All are welcome. I'll release our emails to Helen Sullivan at the beginning of next week so she can get the blog going.

At our first meeting we had a wonderful time getting to know each other and deciding how we'd like to see things work. As mentioned above, Helen Sullivan will be creating a blog to which we will all be able to contribute. It will be the clearinghouse for everything we do, including assignments, meeting times and locations, shared articles, discussions, our classics, and whatever else we decide we want.

For now, however, I wanted to let you know what is happening this month and into November. We will meet on the fourth Tuesday of November, the 27th, at 7:30 pm at my home on 3629 S. 2140 E. That will be the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. Come fat.

Our first book is A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching A Generation Of Leaders For The Twenty-First Century by Oliver DeMille. This book can be purchased at www.tjed.org or on Amazon. It can also be checked out at the library, but the waiting list for it is generally several weeks long. I would like to follow it up with Leadership Education: The Phases of Learning, also by Oliver DeMille, as the two books really should be one. The first is a very short introduction and the second helps flesh it out. I am afraid that a reading of the first only will rob us of the real meat I outlined in the first email I sent out to you. Helen Sullivan has made a suggestion for the second author for us to explore, John Holt. I know that these books will lead us into an infinite number of books, articles, and other resources to explore.

The reading in the TJED book to be completed for November 27th is chapters 1-6 (pages 1 through 96). They set forth some principles which will be illustrated in public school, college, career, and public service settings in later chapters. As you read, remember how writing can enhance your learning. Writing in the book itself ensures that you have a conversation with the author, and that future readers of the book will be able to have a conversation with both the author and you! Pay particular attention to the phases of learning described in chapter 3, the 7 Keys of Great Teaching in chapter 4, and the importance and roles of classics found in chapter 5.

Possible questions to consider for your writings might be:

What phases am I operating in right now? What about my children? Which phases are best nutured in my current family culture? (Think about the fact that we don't move from phase to phase, leaving one behind to enter another. Rather, we build phase upon phase, like concentric circles, and use all the phases we have experienced each day.) What phases could we revisit that might help us with current challenges we face in our family?

Which of the 7 keys seem the most natural to me, and why? Which are difficult for me to understand or accept? In what ways do I use or neglect these keys as I teach my family? If I were to choose one key to focus on for the next few months, which would it be and how would that focus look in our family's daily life?

If a classic is anything we return to again and again because every time we do we are deepened, then what are my personal classics? (A classic can be a book, song, work of art, activity, place, person, etc.) What are our family classics? Are there classics from my childhood I want to incorporate into my family culture? What would be my system for incorporating those classics (what would that incorporation look like on a daily/weekly/monthly/yearly basis?)

Who are my mentors? Who looks to me as a mentor? How many mentors can I identify for each of my children? Which of the five environments of mentoring do my children experience on a regular basis? How could I incorporate more of them into our family's culture?

What inspirations did I receive while reading, or what ideas and themes were impressed upon me?

Why the heck is Jenny such a verbose and addled writer?

These questions are just helps. Write about what YOU need to write about. You will have the opportunity to share your writings through the blog and through the discussion, but that will not be expected or required. The important thing is to invest yourself in your learning by recording, pondering, and expressing your thoughts, impressions, and plans as you read. This is easier to do if you have access to chocolate or a bubble bath. Or both.

I would also like to introduce one more element into our discussions each month. We all have resources (our classics) we couldn't do without as we teach our families and as we learn ourselves. Let's share them with each other!! In order to do this in an organized, thoughtful way, I'd like to suggest we "show-and-tell" topically. To get us started, let's begin with something fun, simple, and (if you are Helen) straightforward: MATH. If you have something you use to teach or learn math, would you bring it to share on Nov. 27th? We will have a table there to display our math treasures, and everyone will have one minute to introduce their classic. It can be a toy, game, book, program, movie, website, tool, outing, article, person, whatever deepens you as you learn/teach math. If you don't have something that comes to mind, don't worry! You don't need to share something every time. This is just to be able to sample the great things that are out there without doing a ton of research or spending a bunch of money. We can decide the show and tell topic for the next month at each meeting (from discipline to books to art to life skills to writing to service to faith to fill-in-the-blank!) , and hopefully get a chance to incorporate Lori Koerner's great idea and address individual concerns along the way. We can also summarize our topical classics each month on the blog and add to them as we find more.

Finally, Amy Rich proposed giving our group a name. If you have an idea, email it to me. Helen can post all ideas on our blog and we can vote on our favorites. I'll forward some of Amy's suggestions to get your creative juices flowing.

For my part, I'm going to take a class on communicating more ideas with fewer words. That way, my informational emails won't become our readings themselves.

See you after Thanksgiving!!!

Admiring You All,

Jenny