I am teaching a class of home-schooled high school students in their second year of composition with me. The first year, first semester, we did a good deal of imitation, and analyzing sentences and paragraphs ( ala Francis Donnely). The second semester, we began working our way through the progymnasmata, and tackled narration, description and fable. Additionally, all year we reviewed grammar (as a basic skill) with sentence diagramming. This year, we are continuing through the progym, and have done proverb and anecdote (ala D'Angelo's Composition in the Classical Tradition), and are keeping commonplace books of figures of speech (schemes first semester, tropes second semester). I hope year 3 will be LToW, with a fast trip through Year 1 and on to Year 2.
Before we tackle our next exercise this year, which is Confirmation/Refutation, I felt the kids needed an introduction to the topics of invention, and I have been using many ideas from LToW as introductions to the topical questions, etc. But now I find I am out of module help for circumstance, relationships and authority. So I guess I am asking this:
1. When will additional Invention modules be posted? Any idea? 2. On the circumstance questions, why do we only consider the affirmative of the issue, and not the negative also (whether they are possible/probable)? And how are you differentiating between the possible/probable? I have a general idea where you are going here- but any help would be appreciated. 3. On relationships, I am unsure how the final question, "What are the parts of the terms or issues", relates to relationship. Isn't this a definitional question?
Thanks for any help here- and forgive my ignorance if these are obvious questions. They are not so obvious to me I'm afraid! Chris in NM
