Ryken & unrealistic expectations for an average high school student!

[kssunflower]

Hi - I bought year one of this curriculum because of the thoughtful world view, the use of interesting history and literature sources (not dry textbooks), and its outstanding reputation for being rigorous enough to prepare students for college level work. However, after almost completing the rhetoric level unit one of year one with my reasonably intelligent, hard-working high school sophomore, I am ready to move on to something else. How in the world is it legitimate to expect a first or second year high school student to rip through the first 6 chapters of Ryken in 2 or 3 weeks? There is enough material there to cover an entire semester!!! How much time and energy is spent reading Numbers, parts of Leviticus, and Deuteronomy that may have been better spent on literary analysis of a single episode in Genesis? The history book on Egypt was wonderful but the core reading (we outline also) took well over 10 hours! I have found several examples of this type of unrealistic expectation throughout unit 1 and unit 2! I am losing trust in the designers of this curriculum! I am finding that just completing the basic reading in history and literature (which overlaps Bible study) is taking hours a day! What were the authors thinking?

[Pat]

First, remember that Tapestry is a buffet and how you put that buffet together is up to you. In your case you may wish to blend out some of the longer or deeper R level materials and either skip them altogether or use D level materials instead. Also understand that doing everything in lit and history will comprise a honors level class. At some point I found a chart showing 3 step downs from this level to a regular English class (vs the Honors Lit class).

Also it is possible your student will become more used to the materials if you stay with them. I can say I've seen that in my own personal reading; when I challenge myself, materials that used to take much more time become easier. I can also say I've seen this as well this year teaching R level lit in a coop. My son came into Year 1 having done four years at the D level and was ready to go on all the materials, but the other two students (not I know a big subset) had not done Tapestry before and their parents elected to let them do D level history while doing R lit. Over the last 17 weeks I've seen marked improvement in one student and the other student has kept up (she's very quiet so I have a harder time evaluating her progress). So while it may seem difficult right now, I think it is possible your student will eventually meet this level.

[Pat]

I wanted to come back and add a link to the levels post:
http://www.tapestryofgrace.com/forum...-or-Literature

Edited to add another post:

This is a thread with a user with similar concerns where Marcia explain her background and philsophy:
http://www.tapestryofgrace.com/forum...-S-HIGH-SCHOOL

[Marcia]

I am losing trust in the designers of this curriculum! I am finding that just completing the basic reading in history and literature (which overlaps Bible study) is taking hours a day! What were the authors thinking?

Pat: thanks so much for being so helpful as always. I never remember that I post old threads like that, so you've just saved me quite a bit of time and effort in explaining to "sunflower" (sorry, I don't know your name) what we were thinking.

Tapestry is written for a spectrum of students (there's really no way for an author to exactly serve a national movement by hitting spang on with one offering, so we offer a wide range), and you are right, Pat, that moms do need to customize it to their unique students' needs! One of the "things we were thinking" was that moms know best how much to hand their students. Moms are meant to choose among Tapestry assignments as they see fit. There's enough there to challenge the most advanced students, and we make it as easy as we can for you to customize and simplify from there. I can understand the desire to have it simple: just tell me what to do and I'll do it. But, again, it's just not that easy from our perspective. Many bright students handle Tapestry just fine as written and on pace. Many younger high schoolers are truly still dialectic learners and are just not ready for rigorous R-level studies. We recommend that you combine the more challenging D books, a full set of Writing assignments, and some of the literary analysis that you'll learn about if you read through Poetics and Frameworks into a lower-level credit for younger R's, if this is their learning stage.

All that said, I also do want to say this: the Literature track for Year 1 is under revision, and slated to be done in late 2012. We began our Redesign project with Year 1 five years ago, and feedback like yours has helped us to hone the level and the challenge for students as we wrote along. Each year-plan got smoother, and easier for both moms and students to handle. Also, since the R Lit track is a complete system of literary analysis, the further we got with it, and the more practice our customers had, the more positive things we began to hear. Over time, we learned to do things better and better, and we are now in the process of going to go back and streamline the amount of reading for Y1 R students in the 2012 revisions of Tapestry (which for DE customers will be simply a free update). Please know that we hear you and, in many week-plans, we have found a way to do it better for Year 1 younger R students. So, we do thank you for your feedback. It's always valuable to us, and I hope that you'll be able to customize Tapestry to your son's needs in the near future.