Happy Birthday, Nathan!!!

Wow, Nathan is 10 today! I can hardly believe that! Ten years ago, I was lying in my Air Force Academy hospital bed in my shared room, staring at this new little person for whom I was responsible. What a daunting feeling!

Now I'm looking at this young man who is spreading some wings and growing up and thinking that this stage is just as daunting!

Classical education talks about the 3 stages of education. The grammar stage is the earliest, where the kids just soak up information. The logic stage is the second one, where the kids starting making connections and thinking critically. Then the third stage is the rhetoric stage, where they learn how to express themselves and what they know.

Over the past year, I have clearly seen Nathan move into the logic stage. He is questioning things, especially on car rides and at the table, where he leads us off into long and involved conversations about things like small businesses, world politics and government systems, birth control, and other varied topics. "Why" is something he is saying a lot. Sort of like when he was 2, but now he actually has deep questions and expects answers! It's been neat discussing our worldview and how that influences what we think about different issues. I am very glad to be homeschooling during this logic stage, so that he can ask me those questions and we can discuss them.

His favorite subject in school is history, which certainly lends itself to discussing these sorts of thorny issues! This next year we will start into the Modern time period, from the Civil War to the present, so I'm sure plenty of things will crop up as we deal with slavery, the Holocaust, communism, and so on. I am really enjoying this new stage! It's been intellectually stimulating for me too, and I never know what topic will come up on a boring and routine drive to the commissary!