Vlog: The case for Accelerated Christian Education
I am constantly inviting guest posts on this blog. I particularly want to hear someone defend ACE against my criticisms. Finally someone has… The eleven-year-old me. And a stegosaurus.
Watch and learn.
By the way, do you guys like the vlogs? They’re a lot more time-consuming to make than blog posts, so you’d better watch ’em!
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Posted on October 26, 2012, in Accelerated Christian Education, Christianity, Education, Faith Schools, Fundamentalism, School of Tomorrow and tagged Accelerated Christian Education, Christian, Dinosaur, Education. Bookmark the permalink. 7 Comments.
Leaving Fundamentalism 
Funny enough, I still have nightmares about diagramming sentences! Our teachers used to break us up in small groups of three or four, and give us these hugely complicated sentences, then time us as we diagrammed them– usually in a race against the other group. It was filler work; we knew it was filler, but they graded pretty harshly about it!
I would agree, it’s pretty useless; I never did figure out what we were supposed to be learning when we put those words on to the little shoe-trees.
I love the vlogs.
You pointed out that the way they presented your interview was dishonest as it did seem as if you had been a student there for a while. Out of curiosity, if the interview had been conducted after a day at the school, a week, a month how would your 11 year old opinion have changed?
Ah those diagramming sentences, yes, the headache inducing task of picking a sentence apart, good for brainstorming games but I can’t quite figure out how you can place this in a realistic situation….my kids would sweat beads everytime they had to negotiate them, and after a while of painstakingly dissecting sentences with them, I’d be slinging paracetamols down my neck. I guess my children never succeeded in completing those mind-constipating PACEs because we’d all be out that door milling with the population, switching into reality!!!!
In Canada (Ontario 1960’s), we were taught a similar exercise called ‘parsing’ in our grammar lessons during grade 8. I remember our teacher explaining to us that being able to identify and manipulate the parts of a sentence would give us a ‘leg up’ for writing essays in high school / college, and later in the working world when we might be required to write reports, grant applications, peer reviewed articles, etc.
Seems similar in purpose to Latin, which gives English more depth and understanding by looking at one of its root languages.
In both cases, we were taught as a class, with lots of social interaction and using contextual examples from other resources, English lit, history, etc. That probably took a lot of the boredom out of the exercises.
ps. I enjoy your Vlogs with their immediacy; on the other hand, your blogs give me more chance to stop and think about your content.
The vlogs continue to be good.
I did get the impression, listening to your younger self, that he was excited over what he had heard about ACE, but had not been using it enough to be bored. And note that there will be boring aspects of any teaching method – the excitement will always fade after a while, even if the schools is good and manages to keep up the student’s interest.
Yes, I went through that parsing business, though not actually diagramming. I seem to recall that I was pretty good at it, but I did not see much point. Later, in high school, I took a German class. And I learned a lot more about English grammar from studying German grammar, than I could ever have learned in English classes alone.
Jonny, I really like the vlogs – especially those with your younger self. I’m impressed at how well you did at making those videos when you were a kid.
I have a burning question about the ACE curriculum: is it possible to graduate (finish your A levels and GCSEs in the UK, I think?) using only ACE material?
I also did hundreds of sentence sectioning using A Beka curriculum. What a big waste of time!
u tototally bashed your eleven year old self…j/k (sarcaism)
great Vlog, i enjoyed it.