I'm not sure what I should do with my 7th grader. He has either already read much of the Year 3 lit and/or it is pretty easy. I've substituted selections this year, but I'm just not sure what to do. We are on week 11. He started at 9am on Monday morning and by 11: 30, he had read all of his history for the week and answered all of the questions. He had also read two weeks worth of Princess and the Goblin and answered the 2 weeks worth of worksheets on that. Now I know that rhetoric frameworks and poetics is awfully deep. My 9th grader is doing Les Miserables right now and I'm not sure he could handle that. He has already read Island of the Blue Dolphins and if I had him reread it, then I have no doubt that he would have finished the novel as well as the worksheets for all three weeks within the first week easily. He keeps a reading log of outside reading ( not counting TOG) and he has already read 6,000 pages which included all of the Lord of the Ring books as well as the Jeff Shara trilogy on the Civil War. Which brings up unit 3. He LOVES the Civil War. We have been to many of the battle sites and have the TravelBrains computer program/ tourguides to Gettysburg, Antietam, Battle of Bull Run etc. He has read all of the dialectic resources all ready, so I considered just bumping him up to rhetoric for the Civil War since he already has a good knowlege. I just wasn't sure. There is such a HUGE jump between dialectic and rhetoric, especially in literature. Although he can tell me exactly what happened, I'm not sure he is ready for the deep thinking.

Christine

Have you discussed it with him? If so I'd do that.

Also, you could pick one week of R level with the literature in particular being an intact piece and see what he thinks and how he does.

I was a big reader at this age too, but my experience says that reading books like the Grapes of Wrath and even the short and simple Old Man and the See made me disinterested in them and their writers because I thought they were boring. So I would be very cautious in this.

The other thing to think about is what sort of plan do you have for this child in high school. Would you be open to him going to college a couple of years early? How would he do with that?

In the meantime I read about the Civil War over this summer and my dad who is a huge buff and has read about the Civil War for 50+ years suggested How the North Won by HERMAN HATTAWAY and Archer Jones as the best book about the strategy and tactics that allowed the North to win. He told me it was the first book that explained the big picture of the war to him. Since it was published 30 years into his time reading about the war, I think that says something.

All of your concerns are EXACTLY why I don't know what to do. This has always been a the bare minimum to get by. He would much rather run outside than do school. Well, he does love to read. But written work... He has always struggled with math but suddenly last spring a light went on. He went from being in the 50 percentile in testing to 90th in math. He is also the most absent minded, disorganized kid I have ever met. He had his glasses in his hand for testing, then tied his shoes and left them. If find his papers EVERYWHERE instead of in his notebook. I have to force him DAILY to fill out his sheet of what he did each day. He will still end up doing whole week's worth of vocabulary in one night so he can play a computer game the next day. He is an average student. However, I wonder if I am doing the right thing when he hands me all of his history and literature work after just a few hours. If he loves the subject, then he'll do it quickly. If he hates the book, then it will take him forever or until their is a deadline like finish it or no weekend computer time.

Christine

To me what you are describing is a bright middle school student. I think I would look to fill some of his time with extra reading that is on the topics he likes (Iike the Civil War), good and fun literature, etc. But since he likes to go out and do things, let him.

Certainly you could consider one of those "learn to learn" programs that would maybe help him be more organized, but I suspect maturity is also needed. You could also add some fun stuff to fill things out (I know I've heard of an amusement park physics curr.)

I have three students in my class like the one you're describing, though mine are 14, 15, and 17 respectively. What I find with them is that they can devour reading and sometimes have great insights (clearly their bright minds are interacting with it on some level), but they don't like to do the thinking and written work associated with really digging nuggets of meaning out of their Rhetoric literature readings.

As I have encouraged and even required them to grow more disciplined and invest more effort, the result has not been boredom. I've seen the two older ones grow significantly in their enjoyment and penetration. The youngest one has only been in my class for one unit, so the jury is out, but I think he'll be like the others. So I guess my first thought is to encourage you: discipline and doing the "boring stuff" to learn how to really mine literature for its gems won't necessarily kill your student's budding interest in literature. And what I've described as growth in my older two students is where you can get to with your 7th grader under God's grace!

Secondly, however, there is the question "How do we get there?" I can think of two strategies off the top of my head---perhaps the Holy Spirit will use a few ideas from these for you as you develop your own plan.

1) Give your student something huge to chew on for however long it takes him (the rest of the year, if necessary), and see what he does with it. I'd suggest even the UNABRIDGED Les Mis, because your older student is already reading an abridged version, and if your younger student can handle Lord of the Rings, he ought to be able to handle Les Mis (the unabridged version of Les Mis is of similar length and complexity to LOTR). Then, I'd either let him sit in on Rhetoric discussions with your older student or else pick out the juciest, most interesting questions from those discussions and ask your younger student to think about them. Tease him with the mind-tantalizing idea that there's a whole lot more to be gotten out of his reading than he realizes. Make him hungry to find out what all those hundreds of pages MEAN. Don't ask him easy questions, and don't give him answers the first time he asks for them. With my bright fourteen-year-old I routinely say "No, I'm not going to give you the answer yet. You're a smart boy; go work on it awhile and then come back to me. You'll never value an answer until you've earned it." Then, sit back and see what he does. See whether the book holds his interest (I've never met a student who didn't find Les Mis fascinating!), and see whether his willingness to work for answers grows. If he sticks with the book, fabulous! The great thing about 7th grade is that you don't have to put any of it on a high school transcript, so if he just finishes that one book this year, yay! If he sticks with the book AND starts to tackle one or two literary analysis projects because he now find them interesting, even better! But again, no need to rush. He can spend five weeks, if you feel like it, just trying to wrap his mind around explaining each character's experiment in living (for instance). Or if Hugo's style interests him, he could spend multiple weeks looking at images and hyperbole in it. Or whatever. There are plenty of starting points for literary analysis exercises contained in your Rhetoric class plans; I'd just see if any of those interest him. The main point here is to show him that more work = more depth, and that more depth = more pleasure and insight.

I find that the easiest and quickest way to make any student WANT to learn is by pointing out to him the truth that learning is NOT a right; it's a profound privilege. So if you say "I'll give you A CHANCE to read this big book," or "I'll LET you sit in with us on our Rhetoric discussion, but you're not allowed to talk unless you have something really interesting to say" or "MAYBE you can work on a Big Kid literature analysis exercise, if you do a really good job with it," or "Isn't this an interesting question? I'll give you an answer to it after you've thought about it for a day or two, if you can't come up with a good one for yourself," suddenly it becomes valuable to him.

The other thing I say all the time to my fourteen-year-old student is "What, you thought this would be easy?" Great literature is NOT easy, and mining it requires hours of patient effort. So one thing that I'm always very careful to do is to say to my students "This won't be easy. I'm not here to win your affections or give you candy or play games with you. This is the serious business of developing adult wisdom and insight, and seeing more of God as we delve into literature. There is deep pleasure to be had here, but make no mistake; my job is not to entertain you. It's to grow your souls, because I love you too much to try for anything less than that." So far, the result has been that they adore me as a teacher and work hard at every assignment I give them. I can only conclude that this is because it really IS pleasurable and satisfying to work hard for something precious, and that their affections are best gained by my setting myself to love them into growth, not into entertainment. Which is not to say that our classes aren't fun---they are! We laugh, we tease each other, I make jokes and tell stories... but I also make them think and work and reach deep, and don't give them the impression that they are there for anything less than hard work that will yield real fruit.

(By the way, if you can have your husband say this gently to your children as my Dad did to us when we were in school, it really helps arrogant, argumentative, or complaining kids---such as I was---to be reminded that "Mom isn't teaching you because SHE doesn't know this stuff. She's doing you a huge favor by going over this discussion/correcting this paper/helping you with your math. She doesn't have to be here. She could be out having coffee with her friends. Her help and care, however imperfect in your eyes, deserve your gratitude." Whenever Dad said that, it made me wake up and pay attention to the fact that Mom's teaching wasn't my RIGHT; it was her gracious gift to me.)

2) The other possible strategy I can think of is that you forget about literary analysis altogether and just let him read his head off, read whatever rhetoric books he can wrap his mind around and be interested in, with maybe an occasional hint that he will get a lot more out of them when he comes back four years from now. I would say "Don't think that you aren't going to have to read these again, because trust me, there's a LOT more here than you're getting, but if you want to try a first round, go ahead." It would be no bad thing for a 7th grader to read the Great Works of the 19th century, even though he will only understand about a 10th of what he reads. If nothing else, it will build his stamina and his vocabulary. My only concern here is pride: it was very easy for me, as a "reader" from an early age, to get a swelled head because I was reading big books while still young. However, this can obviously be combatted by reminding him that 1) his gifting comes from God and is for God's glory, not his ("What do you have that you have not been given?"), 2) God will require an account of how he uses his gifts (parable of the servant with ten talents of gold), and 3) Again, pointing to the work that he WILL have to do in the future, and saying "You're reading this now, which is good! But you should be humbled to realize how little you are really understanding it compared with what you will understand when you are older and doing more work with it."

Phew! What a long rambling set of thoughts! I really want to stress that these are just my observations and thoughts that the Holy Spirit has used to help me in my own life as a student and as a teacher with my own students. I hope some of them will help you, but ultimately it is your own walk with Christ and the Holy Spirit at work in your life, with your child, who will show you what to do. :-) God bless in you that process of drawing nearer to Christ as you depend upon Him for wisdom regarding this precious student of yours!

Please accept my sincere admiration for you and all these ladies who have become my personal heroes because of the way you lay down your lives to serve God in your families. My heart and prayers are with you, and it is my deep delight to serve you!

Christy Somervile