How to Learn on Your Own: Creating an Independent Scholar Resource Plan One of the most challenging and gratifying parts of learning alone is the opportunity to search for and select your own learning material. Students in traditional classrooms usually don’t get to decide how they are going to master course content. Instructors decide for them in the form of textbook selection, quizzes, tests, group projects, etc. As an independent learner, you can make your study time more effective by using only the learning methods that work for you. A resource plan is a document used to brainstorm the learning material you can use when you begin your studies. Before you write a step-by-step schedule, think of every resource that is available to you (such as books, websites, knowledgeable people, etc). This article will show you how to create a resource plan to use in your independent studies. Step 1: Set a Goal The first step to creating a resource plan is to decide on a single goal. Step 2: Collect Materials Step 3: Make Connections Step 4: Take Action
Teaching Kids to Keep a Commonplace » Simply Convivial This is a guest post by Kathy Weitz. The Schole Sisters have done a fabulous job of telling y’all what a commonplace book is and why you should do it. I have also written about my own personal journey with commonplacing. Commonplace books are a fixture in our homeschool and in our local classical liberal arts co-op, Providence Prep, where I teach literature and English Studies. In fact, the copybooks and commonplace books are at the heart of the language arts curriculum which we are developing at Cottage Press. If keeping a commonplace book is new to you, I hope the some of the principles and practical ideas culled from my own homeschool and co-op experience will help you get a good start. Our Commonplace Books My students keep commonplace books from junior high on, averaging three or four commonplace entries per week. Yes, we do write in our books! Of course, this also means that students must own the books they study, so we make provision for that in our curriculum budgeting. Related
Reading, Commonplace Books Austen, Thomas, Rev., compiler. Occasional Meditations: Compiled from Various Authors as They Accidentally Came to Hand / by Me T. Austen of Rochester, April 15th, 1770: Manuscript, 1770–1782. MS Eng 613. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. In the most general sense, a commonplace book contains a collection of significant or well-known passages that have been copied and organized in some way, often under topical or thematic headings, in order to serve as a memory aid or reference for the compiler. The commonplace book has its origins in antiquity in the idea of loci communes, or "common places," under which ideas or arguments could be located in order to be used in different situations. Commonplace books selected for the Reading collection emphasize unpublished manuscript commonplace books and printed commonplace books with handwritten entries from the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Published Materials Manuscript Materials Browse commonplace books by date:
Finding Your Way Into Your Story - WRITERS HELPING WRITERS® I recently avoided a workshop assignment that should have been completed in no more than an hour because I couldn’t find a way into my story. This workshop generates significant, raw material for me. New characters and compelling stories emerge; sentences flow, and everyone contributes imaginative, heart-stuttering stories. It’s a word-feast, and I was strolling along eating it all up, licking my fingers—when it vanished, and I found myself with word-sticky fingers, staring at a blank page. I had characters, an idea, but they were elusive. There exist strategies to help writers overcome a sense of feeling blocked, but that’s not my focus today. Character: Character is a writer’s lodestone, and we enter our stories in various ways through them: what they want, what they’re doing, how they look, what they think, how they feel. Courtesy: Pixabay Perspective: “This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” begins The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. Save Related Author Janet Gurtler on VOICE
Introduction to Self-Education Welcome to SelfMadeScholar.com. This blog is all about self-education – people learning what they want to know without formal schools or classrooms. Let’s start with the basics: What is self-education? Self-education is learning in its purest form. You decide what you want to learn, when you’re going to learn it, and how you’re going to master the subject. You can start at any age, whether you’re one or one-hundred. Why self-education? Take a look at almost any great historical figure and you’ll find that he is a product of self-education. Consider these examples: Abigail Adams received no formal education. Renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell decided not to follow his plans to earn a doctorate degree. and The Hero With a Thousand Faces – works that are still studied on college campuses today. Early American patriot Benjamin Franklin ended his formal education when he was just ten years old. Too old-fashioned you say? and Fahrenheit 451 • James Cameron didn’t need film school. Happy studying.
Toward a Life Well Read | Scholé Groups Our high school Humanities II curriculum at Providence Prep concentrates on classic works of literature, poetry, and history—the Great Books canon of western civilization—contextualized by an outstanding history lecture series from Dr. George Grant. In general, our literature selections were written during the historical time period we are studying, although we reserve the right to stray from it a bit each year, most notably on two “Shakespeare Days”, during which the entire class period is devoted to one of the Bard’s masterpieces. Our focus at Providence Prep this year was Modernity, from the Enlightenment to the present. Literary selections included novels by Austen, Dickens, Shelley, Dostoyevsky, Orwell, and Lewis. Poets from Alexander Pope to T. “. . . one of my main endeavours as a teacher is to persuade the young that firsthand knowledge is not only more worth acquiring than secondhand knowledge, but is usually much easier and more delightful to acquire. . . .” — C. Read Write
James Mill's Common Place Books A collaborative project with the London Library. Search Mill's Common Place Books: Welcome to the electronic edition of James Mill's Common Place Books, edited by Robert A. Fenn. The project is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). First time visitors to the site may wish to consult our introduction to Mill's common place books, as well as our user guide which details how to get started. James Mill by unknown artist© National Portrait Gallery, London. Locus Online: The Website of The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field The American Scholar: A Declaration of Intellectual Independence “The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future. He must be a university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know all, it is for you to dare all.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson Just 61 years after the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, Ralph Waldo Emerson offered a declaration of his own urging Americans to stop being “parrot[s] of other men’s thinking.” The groundbreaking speech, later titled The American Scholar, is a treasure trove of autodidactic insight. In his speech, Emerson draws attention to three ways that people can become independent thinkers and free themselves from over-reliance upon the ideas of others. Study the Past
Why You Should Always Carry a Notebook – The Mission There isn’t one prolific creator of any kind that I know that hasn’t abided by the policy of carrying a notebook. I have stacks of Moleskine notebooks on my bookshelves. All the projects, books, and ideas that I’ve turned into reality started in the pages of my notebooks. If you let it, a notebook can become a platform for your imagination.It can give you the opportunity to rewrite the story of your life.It can enable you to create more than you consume In his amazing collection of essays The Life and Times of a Remarkable Misfit, my friend AJ Leon says the following: I use a tiny Moleskine as my idea notebook. In his piece on advice for recent graduates, Austin Kleon said the following: Carry your journal around with you and write in it all the time: make notes in between job interviews, doodle while you’re watching Netflix, daydream about what you want out of life, etc. Richard Branson carries a notebook. Ryan Holiday has written about the value of a commonplace book.
Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought : Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought Oxford Scholarship Online Abstract This is a study of the Renaissance commonplace-book. Commonplace-books were the information-organizers of Early Modern Europe, notebooks of quotations methodically arranged for easy retrieval. From their first introduction to the rudiments of Latin to the specialized studies of leisure reading of their later years, the pupils of humanist schools were trained to use commonplace-books, which formed an immensely important element of Renaissance education. The common-place book mapped and resourced Renaissance culture's moral thinking, its accepted strategies of argumentation, its rhetoric, and it ... This is a study of the Renaissance commonplace-book. Keywords: Renaissance, Early Modern Europe, quotations, Latin, leisure reading, humanist schools, moral thinking, France, cultural history Bibliographic Information
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