I’ve taken a month-long hiatus for a few reasons. First, some other things have come up that needed attending to.

Second, I’ve been researching ways to improve 21CL. (Yup. That’s the pseudo-acronym I’m using from now on…) Foremost of those improvements is OUR NEW FORUM at:

https://21cl.boardhost.com/index.php.

Seriously, go check it out and take it for a spin. You will need to complete the simple registration to gain access.

Third, I have been procrastinating. There are about a dozen remnants of unfinished, failed posts on my various devices. My hope was to post something in August that was uplifting and encouraging about the upcoming opening of school. Alas, the world has moved ahead while I have not. Sorry. But it’s probably a good thing. Now that school has started and most folks have at least got some kind of temporary set up for kids to return to schooling, my thoughts are really no longer germane.

But yours are.

Please consider going to that new 21st Century Lyceum Forum and commenting on my first substantial post, “What are you and your family doing to mitigate schooling during the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak?” Are you using your local public school resources? In-person or virtually or a hybrid? What other ways is your local district connecting with families? Have you investigated private or parochial schooling, homeschooling, or some other option? How are you supervising both the instruction and just day-to-day care of your child(ren)? Have you thought of adapting the pod or co-op idea? If so, how? And so on, ad infinitum…

Please share your thoughts, ideas, and trials and tribulations with other 21CL members as we all gingerly tiptoe through this viral craziness. Perhaps we can serve as resources for each other as we pick our way through.

Just click on the post, “On all of our minds…” on the Index page and hit the Post Reply button to type your message.

Fourthly and finally, I wanted to move forward with a better curricular (for lack of a better term) plan for the blog. Now that we have flirted with logical fallacies, established how classical training became passĂ© in nineteenth-century America, and gained some initial experience with Bernice McCarthy’s 4MAT system of planning for learning constructively and within the natural learning cycle, it’s time to re-group.

This episode’s video is a re-introduction to informal logic and fallacies…, but this time with feeling! 🙂

The original plan was to acquaint everyone who needed such acquaintance with logical fallacies in such a way that the teachers and moms and dads and such who were following this blog could apply their newfound knowledge and skills to mentoring their young charges with the same. This was an outgrowth of my original goal of offering classical and contemporary best practices in learning for parents and teachers.

As I was sitting in front of my laptop, wringing my hands about the reopening of schools and what to do next, I came across the Classical Academic Press. I’ll discuss this great company more in the video, but suffice it to say that I have decided to adopt their considerably age-appropriate and comprehensive Logic offerings here. I dare you not to love their approach!

I’ll be integrating their M. O. for learning informal logic – the kind we use in everyday communication – with the principles and practices of McCarthy’s 4MAT system. Here it is…

Video Full Disclosure: If you have a thing about spiders, I need to let you know that a friendly neighborhood one joins me around 9 minutes in. After much consideration (and lots of prodding from Carolinn to run it – she thinks it’s hilarious), I am posting this take. It is not the best take of the seven I did for this episode, but it is pretty entertaining. If you are squeamish about crawly things, just turn away from your screen and listen only. It still works as a solely audio post.

 

Summary of video

  • How 4MAT can be applied to courses (year), units (months), and lessons (weeks and days)
  • How we will use 4MAT in our further study of logical fallacies
  • A review of the Connect step for logical fallacies
  • Quick assignment of Attend and Image steps
  • This is the beginning of the Inform part of the What? question
  • The Classical Academic Press
  • 3 categories of logical fallacies
  • 3 subcategories of the Relevance group

 

Resources specific to this post

General resources