The Sequoia Breeze

Rebecca: Welcome, listeners, to the Sequoia Breeze podcast, a breath of fresh air for your home school. I am your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Thank you for choosing to spend your time with us today. I'm so excited that you are joining us for this episode. Please subscribe and rate this podcast wherever you listen to The Sequoia Breeze. I would appreciate it if you would share it with somebody that you know, that you think would enjoy listening as well. Welcome, listeners. I am so excited to have you join us today as we talk to Andrew Pudewa, who is the founder and creator of Institute for Excellence in Writing, also known as IEW. Many of you will probably have heard of this curriculum. It is something that is commonly used amongst home schoolers and is a vendor for our schools. So that is an option for us to use. And Andrew, I'm so excited to have you here today. Thank you for joining me.

Andrew: It's a pleasure. I'm very excited.

Rebecca: Is there anything else about the history of IEW that you would like our listeners to know?

Andrew: Well, I started it kind of as a part time gig back in 1995 in a desperate effort to try and make a little bit of extra money so that I could afford to still be a violin teacher. And within five years I was doing better, running around teaching writing classes and seminars and doing teacher training and stuff than I was teaching music. So we moved across the country and I went full time, and gradually, over the couple decades, I've seen just so many lives transform teachers, parents. We do probably 70% or so of our total work is with homeschoolers directly, and then the remaining with alternative forms of education. Charter school, hybrid schools, classical schools are very excited about what we do, and I don't think it's anything specific to me, but the system just works very well, particularly on helping the reluctant writer, the child who may have difficulty with reading writing due to something like a Dyslexia, an addd or something like that. But we also hear stories of very high talent kids that go on and start college classes when they're younger teenagers and do very well. So we're in a position, I think, of enough experience to be able to help pretty much anyone improve communication skills. And the tagline of our business is IEW listen, speak, read, write, think. And so that's where we put our focus on cultivating those arts of language.

Rebecca: I want to come back to that tagline in a minute, but first I'd like to explain to our listeners a little bit of how I got connected with IW. We are using that this year with my fourth grader, 7th grader and 9th grader for the first time. We've never used that before, and I had friends that used it, people I trusted that swore by it. It never quite grabbed me. I hadn't quite decided that I wanted to use that until I went to a home school convention and heard you speak. And while I was there listening to you teach the parents at that conference, I realized that I really wanted my children to learn from you. And so it really wasn't the curriculum that sold me, but you. And a lot of your curriculum involves videos of you teaching the kids. And I realized that that's something I wanted my kids to experience, because I could tell that you study and you learn and you think, and then that leads to wisdom, which you were then able to disseminate because you are an effective communicator. And so that leads me to as I was thinking about this interview, I was thinking how I think a lot of us can understand the idea of listening. Immediately within the framework of IW start teaching kids to speak as you ask them to tell the story that they've heard and read what's on their paper, look up, tell the story. I think we understand the idea of reading. You're teaching them how to write. But then I get to the think part, and I really would like to know how to teach my kids to think. So how do we create good thinkers so that our kids have something worthwhile to say? And I would love to hear more from you about that today.

Andrew: Sure. Well, you're very kind. I hope that your children are enjoying the jokes at the beginning of each lesson.

Rebecca: My nine year old pauses it, rewinds it, and says, mom, come here and listen.

Andrew: I recorded 144 video classes in two years time, and I was determined to have a different joke at the beginning of each class. It's interesting. We hear in the world today a lot of people complaining about a lack of critical thinking skills. And I really don't like the term critical thinking. It's a buzzword. People use it without actually knowing what it is. Everyone purports to help teach this, while at the same time everyone is noting that there seems to be a great lack of it. So I try to stay away from the word, the idiom critical thinking. But thinking in general, as a teacher of writing, that's kind of where you get stuck. And anyone out there who has attempted to teach writing to children without some kind of method or system or approach that solves the problem, it will immediately hit the problem of a child saying, I don't know what to write. I can't think of anything. In fact, I would say that nine times out of ten, if I meet a child who says, I hate writing, and I say, Why do you hate writing? And you get past the tautology, because it's hard. Because I don't like it. And you get to the real substance of their problem, it's I don't know what to say. I don't know what to write. I can't think of anything. So I have come up against this problem. How do you help a person who says, I can't think of anything do that? And one of the things that I kind of discovered very early on in my teaching with this system is that thinking is not something comes to you. People say, well, it comes to me. Inspiration? No. With a few exceptions, thinking comes from you. And it's the combination and permutation of previously existing information as it applies to a topic or subject or an issue or circumstance at hand. So the bottom line is that the more stuff you know, the more you will be able to think about stuff and you can't get something out of a mind that isn't in there to begin with.

Rebecca: I wrote that down, actually, because you said that in the little video that introduces IW on your website. And I thought, well, it's true. You can't create something. It doesn't have something to work with in the first place.

Andrew: I kind of joke and say, only God creates something from nothing. The rest of us are kind of stuck with what we've got. We need ingredients, whether it's for cooking or playing Legos or putting ideas on paper. Another thing that I try to dispel is that writing is somehow importantly connected with self expression. I get a lot of moms, they'll come up to me at a conference and say, oh, I just want my son to be able to express himself. And I think this is an entirely wrong way to think about it. Writing is not about expressing self. It's about expressing ideas. And if you live long enough and get lucky, you may express some particularly unique ideas that are your own. I'm not sure that I have ever had a completely original idea in my whole life. And I'm 62 years old. Everything I've ever thought has come from somewhere. So when we look at this, we think, okay, the first task is the furnishing of the mind. That is a prerequisite for getting something out of the mind. And this, I think, is one area where we see that kind of the modern, progressive approach to education is failing kids. They've put an emphasis on writing as a creative activity, but they haven't spent the effort to furnish the mind with ideas, with history, with science, with literature, with perspectives, with with simple vocabulary. You know, what's interesting is you can't actually think a thought. I mean, you might be able to think it, but you can't express a thought that you don't have the words to think it in. You and I have both lived in a different country and learned a different language. So we have a very acute understanding of how words allow for the expression, communication, recording, and retention of thoughts. And some languages just have words that don't fully translate into other languages.

Rebecca: If so true. In Albanian, for example, they do not have one word that encompasses faith, trust, and belief.

Andrew: Wow.

Rebecca: And as English speakers, we don't think about the subtle differences between those three things. And it's really fascinating to realize that all three of those words actually do have different meanings. And yet I didn't even realize quite how closely they were connected till there was only one word for them. So it went a little bit both directions. But it was interesting that you just said that, because as soon as you said that, if you don't have the words for a thought, you can't think it. I immediately thought about all of the different ways I've discovered that one language or another has ways of thinking things that you can't always express.

Andrew: And Japanese has four words that are very different in meaning, but they would all translate into English as love. And you don't want to misappropriate those words in that language. A lot of what I believe is that if you want people to down the line, be good speakers, writers and thinkers, you want to work on building their database of language through two basic means. One, hearing a regular, continuous source of high quality language, generally from literature sources, daily interactions. We're all very busy. We speak simply, we speak efficiently. We don't necessarily always use even correct grammar, let alone eloquent grammar. So to make up for that deficit in just the busyness of daily life, I am pushing very hard for parents beginning at an early age to make a huge effort to read aloud to their children as much as possible and continue that for a decade or more. Well past the time that kids can read on their own, keep reading aloud to them. And what this will do is it will build in vocabulary and enhance comprehension of vocabulary through context. It will build in patterns of grammar that are beyond simple daily use and more literary and artistic. It will expose a child to the schemes and tropes of great literature, rhetoric, you know, the the literary devices that make language appealing and beautiful and enriching to us and even to many of the seminal ideas. And then as children are able to read more on their own, they get that additional source of literature. But it's always good to keep reading aloud to children at a level above their own decoding skills so that you're pulling up their basic experience of language and therefore their basic comprehension ability. And I think this is one area where, unfortunately, kids who go to school every day, their parents are very busy, sometimes working very hard. They have extracurricular activities, they need relaxation, entertainment, which usually involves screens. And the whole culture of the bedtime story or the reading to families has really died out in modern society, much to the intellectual and academic detriment of children.

Rebecca: That's a subject that's very near and dear to my own heart. And I have actually already done a podcast specifically about reading aloud to your kids and come up with lists of books that I love and all the different subjects. And I have seen my own kids vocabulary really grow, and we've spent time on vocabulary curriculum even, and they don't enjoy it, if I'm honest. But I've told them, you have things to say, but if you don't have the words to say them, then you aren't able to express your thoughts. And so it's important, I think, that vocabulary training is actually a really important piece of my kids education, because if I'm teaching them to think and if I'm giving them knowledge or providing knowledge for them, if they don't have the vocabulary to articulate the things that they're learning, the things that they're thinking, then what's the point?

Andrew: Yeah. Connected with that would be exposure to the good and great books through history that help children learn what other people have discovered and articulated about some of the most important ideas that we face. It's not really reasonable to ask a child to think about what is justice in a particular situation if they have no experience of humanities wrestling with that question in various times and periods of history and circumstances. They're trying to think with an empty tank. Whereas if they've read good and great books and there's that as well as other things, the value of family, the importance of charity, the understanding of integrity, and how that affects everything in your whole life I mean, these are kind of timeless themes that are interwoven. And the reason the great books are great books is because people have found that contemplating those themes as articulated by those great writers over history has been helpful for them to become a better human. And so when I see schools eliminating books because they're old or because they are by Western white authors, or because they are uninteresting to kids, I think, well, what are you replacing that with? Where's the foundation for thought? I will tell you the other thing that I think is very valuable, very important, and also has been kind of marginalized, if not actually eliminated from most schools, and that is memorized language, learning by heart, committing to memory, poetry. Historically, kids would memorize huge chunks of poetry, scripture, they would memorize excerpts of famous speeches. I mean, there was one time when you probably wouldn't graduate from fifth grade if you couldn't recite the preamble to the constitution of the United States from memory. Now, what's the benefit? Well, first and most simply, when you memorize and recite language, it's moving words from your passive vocabulary. I e, yeah, I can read that or hear it and kind of know what it means into your active vocabulary. Oh, I could speak or write that word on demand. So that's the first thing that's happening. The second thing that's happening is you're gaining this confidence in putting words together in eloquent ways that you might not necessarily ever come up with had you not memorized a particular pattern. And then anything that you memorize, you're actually taking into your soul. In fact, my mother was a music teacher. She taught piano and voice lessons my whole life when I was with her for that. But her whole life, and she never used the word memorize. She never said, you have to memorize your piece. She would always say, you must learn it by heart. So I have a very personal experience of how the things that I have committed to memory and it takes time and effort and repetition and discipline and maintenance and all of those actual kind of character building activities, but it changes the soul. The music that I memorized, the poetry, the scripture, the things that I have memorized, those are now part of me in a way that really nothing else is. One of the best stories that I like to tell is about one of my favorite people in history. He just blows my mind, and that's Frederick Douglas. Are you familiar with Frederick Douglas?

Rebecca: Somewhat.

Andrew: He was born a slave in pre civil war, 18 hundreds, very harsh, brutal conditions. It was illegal to teach a slave to read at that time, and he was separated from his parents at a young age. I think, short of being chained up in a closet, you could argue that he had possibly the absolute worst education any human being could get during the most sensitive period of his life. The first 1213 14 years. And circumstances changed a bit when he was a young teenager and some kids tried to help him learn to read, and he taught himself. He's a very smart guy to begin with. Time passed, and then as a free man and as an adult, he was able to give speeches that were so far beyond what anyone else was doing in terms of eloquence and power and conviction. I mean, any of our listeners here right now could go to the web and do a search for Frederick Douglas speeches. Probably the most famous one is called, usually titled what to the slave is the 4 July. And it would blow your mind. I mean, you or I or probably anyone living today could not write this speech. It is so magnificent. I would argue that Frederick Douglas is probably the greatest orator that our country has ever produced, at least from his time forward. And he certainly would blow out any politician alive that I've ever heard today. He wasn't even a politician, but someone asked him once and said, mr. Douglas, how did you become such a powerful speaker? And he said, well, one of the first books I owned was the Colombian orator, which was a collection of famous speeches given or translated into English all the way back from Cicero up through Patrick Henry. And he said, I committed them all to memory. He basically memories the whole book of the greatest speech ever been given in the world. And so it furnished his mind with not just the vocabulary, not just the complexity of grammar and all the possibilities, not just with the figures of speech and the beautiful rhetorical devices, but with the seminal ideas of what is goodness and right and justice and truth and honor. And to me, it's just an incredible testament of how you can have a really, really bad education and still become one of the most educated, effective people in your time. If you follow the path of learning from the classics, both reading and committing.

Rebecca: To memory, wow, that's motivating. I think we can come up with all kinds of reasons if we don't have time or whatever, but to have never even had an education and to undertake that, and that is really incredible. What do you think opened your eyes to the need to teach students not just to write and communicate, but to think? I think a lot of people endeavor, as you've said, to teach kids to write. What was the impetus for you in realizing that we can't just learn to put words on paper? We need to put things into a mind so there is something to write on paper.

Andrew: Well, I think it came for me when I started doing some teacher training, professional development in some of the public schools in Washington and California and Alaska. I'd been running around teaching homeschoolers for six, seven years. And then I had an opportunity to really work with teachers who are on the front lines in classrooms and very often in situations with low literacy culture. I've worked for several school districts in Alaska, and so the Native, the village, the Native populations are just a low literacy environment there. And also in rural areas of Washington State, some schools, 70, 80% of the kids are English as their second language. And I observed the challenge of the teachers trying to prepare these kids for their standardized writing exams, which were in effect in both Washington well, Washington, California, and Alaska. They had these kind of benchmark exams or the Washington Assessment of State Learning Standards, and the teachers were just incapable of getting the kids to be able to do well enough on these tests to make the schools and the school district and everybody happy. So I kind of got into this, okay, I've got techniques, I've got methods. I can help you teach kids how to organize thoughts, but if they don't have that database of stuff, where is it going to come from? And so that kind of got me really thinking that maybe we need to put more attention on the input and less on the output. But I also came up against it in the home school world, very typical. I would meet a mom who would say, I'm a little worried about my daughter, my son, whatever. He's ten, she's twelve. And her writing is just so awkward and it just doesn't kind of makes sense. And I don't know how to help her make sense. Well, the first thing I would point out is that ten and twelve year olds are very awkward. Naturally, they often don't make sense when they're speaking. Most of the time they don't have a filter for what does make sense and doesn't make sense. So don't stress on this. They're just young and everybody grows up. But it's like my teacher, dr. Suzuki of the Suzuki Music School method. He said, you can't shout at a plant and say, Grow and make it grow. What do you have to do? You have to give it water. You have to be sure the soil is nutritious. You have to give it abundant sunlight. You can even play music or think positive thoughts. But it will grow at its own space based on the environmental factors, not on your will to make it happen. And I believe raising and teaching children is very much like this. You can't just say to a kid, this doesn't make sense. Rewrite it and be smarter. The kids thinking, gosh, if I could have done it better, I would have done it better. So just tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it, but otherwise, get off my case. Polite home schoolers don't talk that way to their parents, usually, but they think that way. So it's that balance between the cultivation and then the opportunity for practicing the speaking and writing parts. If you think that listening and reading are in the input side, speaking and writing are on the output side. Now. Jordan peterson. Who? I'm a big fan of jordan peterson.

Rebecca: Oh is my husband.

Andrew: He says some very interesting things about writing. And of course, he's kind of coming out with this essay writing program or system or software. I'm not sure what it's going to be, but he made the observation that writing is the most distilled form of thought. I'm sure that we have all said to our kids, and I heard this a thousand or more, maybe thousands of times growing up. My father said to me, andy, speak. No, andy think before you speak. Because I would just say dumb things and it would probably irritate people. So he would always say, think what you're going to say before you say it and see if that's what you really want to say. Well, if that's important in just daily talking, how much more important is it in writing? And so one of the distinctives of our excellence in writing instruction, style, system, as you know, from seeing your kids getting into it, is that we try to separate the complexity of first you think what you're going to write, and we use outlines, keyword outlines. Then you can attend to the writing out of those ideas in a more artistic or precise way. But most people just throw paper at a kid and say, here, write about this, write about that. And the child is overwhelmed with having to think about what to say and hold it in their memory long enough not to forget what they just thought of and then figure out how to spell the words that they want to write to say the idea that they're trying to remember, that they had most people's frustration with writing is it's overwhelmingly complex. So with our system, we've worked to break it into the smallest, manageable parts of the process, teach those in isolation, and then work on the integration for the finished product, for the whole, and for the skill that you want to take into adulthood.

Rebecca: Learning to actually use your mind to think, not just letting it float, but to have actual concrete thoughts once you have things to think about. I think that some of the holes in our education go back pretty far. And while we're trying to teach our kids these, I'm realizing I have a lot to learn in a lot of these areas as well. I did memorize the Gettysburg Address when I was a kid, or the preamble that was the preamble to the Constitution and part of the Gettysburg Address, but not much else. It wasn't something that I was asked to do. And I think our current culture of education is often you shouldn't have to memorize all the dates and places for history. That's just boring. And it is about sort of being original and creative and self expression and that there's people are really turned off to the idea of anything old that that's boring, and it doesn't apply anymore. And yet if we don't study our history, we are destined to repeat it. But I think that part of the challenge of being able to teach our kids to think is that we have to make sure as parents, we know how to think and that some of this is a challenge for us to continue our own education so that we can raise our children up higher, give them an advantage that has nothing to do with position or money, but just simply to provide them with good thoughts to think and with a good foundation to stand on.

Andrew: Yeah. So I like to tease people often if I'm teaching, and this is particularly fun with a group of teenagers because they're very honest, and I will often just ask audiences, so how do you think if someone says to you, think about this right now, how do you make that happen? And what's interesting is very few people can answer this question at all. High schoolers will generally say, I don't know. The most common answer that I would get if I say to a group of teenagers, how do you think? Is, well, you use your brain. Okay. How do you use your brain? Well, I don't know. It just happens. It just happens. Thinking just happens. You don't make it happen. Well, this is fundamentally wrong. And so then I take it to the next step and say, okay, you can't get something out of your brain that isn't in there to begin with. So if you want to be a good thinker, you need to be able to get stuff out of your brain. It has to be appropriate and connected with the circumstance, but you have to have the skill of getting stuff out of your brain. So if you want to become a good thinker, you start by imitating your mom. Because your mom knows how to get stuff out of your brain. So if you know something and your mom wants to know what you know, what does she do? She asks you questions. Where have you been? Who else was there? What you've been doing all this time? Why are you late? How are you going to clean this up? Right. Your mom becomes a master question asker. So I always tell kids, if you want to become a good thinker, you must become a master question asker to yourself. And I would go so far as to kind of build on what you said that this weakness goes back many, many decades, if not almost 100 years. It's Dewey is a misguided, if you will. But for a lot of us in school and I went to eleven years of public school because I skipped second grade. And for most of my experience in school, it went kind of like this you go there, they give you information, they massage it around a little while. They ask you questions, you give the answers. If you give the right answer, you win the game. If you give the wrong answer, you lose the game. If you refuse to answer, then they kick you out. Because you can't be in that system if you don't play the game. Which is why, by the way, you see a lot of really smart people in kind of the alternative ed. In fact, I even remember in middle school thinking, could I commit a crime? Bad enough to get kicked out of school, but not so bad that I'd actually be in jail. I had that daydream. But if you become a person who asks too many questions yourself, you're not just an irritation, you're now dangerous to the system. So the skill of asking questions has kind of been systematically removed from the curriculum for several generations now. Are there good teachers out there? Absolutely. In fact, almost all the public school teachers that I meet, I would say they've got to be either saints or idiots. And most of them are saints. They're working really hard on the front lines. Why? They love kids. They want a better future for those kids and for their world. But they're handicapped in a structure, a system, a curriculum, a way of operating that is not going to do this. So I have realized that through our system of Iews writing program, we actually do help kids learn to think better by starting with very simple questions and moving toward increasingly. Challenging questions. So you've done keyword outlines with unit one, two. You give the kids a fable, a little bit of information about an animal or a person or a place. They take three keywords from each sentence, put the original away, tell it back, and they write it out. That seems almost too simple to some people. In fact, I've met high school teachers to say, do you really do this with high school students? I mean, it seems like it's not even, like, real writing or anything. Well, it's a starting point. And why is it valuable? Because they have to ask a question. It's a simple question, but they have to ask the question, what are the key words in this sentence? And make a choice based on their answer to the question they ask. We get into unit three with the story sequence chart. The questions are one little notch harder. Who's in the story? What are they like? When and where is it happening? What are the wants or needs? What are the actions or statements that allow this character to fulfill their want or need and solve a problem or a conflict? How is it resolved? And what's the value that we get from the story? These are questions that are embedded in our very simple little tool called the Story Sequence Chart, which you could use with kindergarten for just a discussion aid. Once you write a little picture book, you can also use them with high school students to help them learn not just the structure of stories, but how to structure a story. Then we get into unit four and six, where you're dealing with too many facts. So now we're not just saying, what are the key words in the sentences? Before we even get to that, we have to say, well, what are the interesting, important, or relevant facts? Now we're getting into judgment and discernment. So you've got 50 facts about something. You want to write a summary. You can't tell all 50 facts. So which seven of those 50 are going to make the cut? That's a really important thinking skill. The great historian Hilaire Bellock said that it is the responsibility of an historian not just to convey facts, but to also help the reader understand the priority of those facts in the big picture. And we see this right now. You walk into some places and you'd say, okay, Thomas Jefferson. Well, he was a slave owner, therefore a bad person. That's the fact that he was a slave owner. But that is in nowhere near the list of really important things about Thomas Jefferson. And so we're losing that ability to prioritize. So we teach that in a very simple but formative way when we get into unit five. And I don't know if you've got to that yet in your videos, but that's when the kids write from pictures. Okay.

Rebecca: Started that.

Andrew: Yeah. So now there's no source text, there's no story, there's no list of facts. There's just pictures. And now you have to think of stuff. Well, how do you think of stuff? You got to ask the questions. Who's in the picture? What are they thinking? What are they feeling? What are they doing? What happened before this picture? What happened after? What might happen after this picture? Is there anything outside the picture? And so what I have seen is that as kids go through this system for two or three or four years, they actually do get the habit of being able to ask increasingly good questions. And we move from there into unit seven, creative inventive writing. Unit eight, essays. Essays are tough because that's where you have to collect up facts and tell what you think about those facts. So it's an integration of the skills. And then unit nine, critique in response to literature. You have to be able to read something and ask questions about it in order to read something and write about it. And so you'll notice that in a business I run a business, we've got 50 some people work here. It's the people who come into a situation and ask good questions about the situation that are going to be more effective in contributing to solutions. The people who come into a situation and wait around to be told what to do are not going to be as useful or effective as team members. And I think when I talk to people who teach in universities or other business owners or managers who hire high school and college graduates, their biggest complaint really is people are almost trained to wait to be told what to do. So that's the battle we're fighting. And I think our way of approaching it with this very gentle but continuous increase in complexity of questions that we're modeling and the kids are practicing and using and asking. And then I'll tell them straight out, I'll tell a room full of teenagers, you know what kids? I wouldn't say kids of teenagers. You know what, guys? The quality of your life will depend on the quality of the questions you ask yourself. So if you wake up in the morning and say, wow, how can I get enough money to get the pair of tennis shoes I want or a new iPhone, you'll have one quality of life. If you wake up in the morning and say, how can I today serve my family, my coworkers, my friends, god better so that I can help this world become a better place? You will have an entirely different quality of life. And you know that's one reason I like Jordan Peterson so much is because that's where he's pushing people ask the questions that make a difference. And don't be satisfied with the mediocre, with the standard quell, with the just be happy being bossed around way that so many people now are operating. So that's my little diatribe I got a little long in the that's.

Rebecca: Okay. Two thoughts that I was having as you were talking is, one, I want to encourage our listeners, who some are still really new at home schooling, to be willing to have some of these, if we're honest, uncomfortable thoughts of doing things really differently. You are home schooling because school wasn't working or because you've decided that your kids are better at home learning from you. And so be willing to expand your understanding of how we can educate our children and not just accomplish, quote unquote, school. And this requires for us as the teachers to be willing to put in the effort to learn new ways ourselves. If we realize we aren't good at asking ourselves questions, then we need to practice that skill as well, asking our kids good questions to get more than just a fine from them.

Andrew: And the other thing in that regard is, I think a lot of teachers and parents, all of us, we fail to realize that asking good questions is a skill. How do we learn a skill? Well, we learn it through imitation, right? We learn to walk and talk and play the piano and draw pictures by watching other people do all these things. And then we try it. And then helpful people will come along and say, well, if you do it this way, it'll work a little better. And so acquiring a skill is all it's a cycle of having a model, making an attempt to imitate that model, receiving feedback on that attempt and making another attempt, and then having a model to imitate and continuing in that cycle. And asking questions, I would argue, is a skill. And so how do we learn it? Well, we want to study the people who have asked the really good and hard questions that all of humanity has faced from the beginning of recorded history until recently. And the more we can wrestle with that. That's why some of the most seminal philosophers and theologians like Thomas Aquinas. He always would begin by asking a question, and then he would give the theology to answer the question or whatever, using logic and whatnot which we should talk about logic a little bit before we run out of time. But he would model the questions. You can even look at great teachers. Their emphasis was on modeling questions, not on here's the answers to the question I'm going to ask you later kind of approach.

Rebecca: And going back just a little bit to when you were first introducing the simple questions for kids, how to wonder what are the most important words in this story or in this sentence? And building and building and building. The quick application that came to mind for me on that was these are really good questions to be able to ask when you hear a news story or when somebody gives you information and you're trying to decide on the veracity or the perspective that it's coming from. We did another episode where we talked about unbiased news giving and how to decide is it unbiased? Or where is this news coming from? And being able to ask yourself questions as you're listening gives you the skill to then begin to verify, not take everything at face value. Just because somebody you like said it, doesn't mean it's true, accurate or helpful information. So being able to ask some of those questions can have a real, I think, practical value even in going about daily life and receiving those receiving information, even if it's not something you need to write about, it just helps you evaluate.

Andrew: Sure. I mean, we should always be asking ourselves how do I know this question? Our assumptions and where's the source of our information? How do we know that that's a valid source of information? It's epistemology. How do we know anything that we know? It goes back to the ancient problems. And I think it's so funny. Everyone wants to throw out the ancients because they're old. And yet you look at some of the things that Aristotle and the early Greeks and Romans and then the medieval philosophers were able to articulate. Those are the same things we got going on right now. How do we know what we know? Another very good question that I saw recently, it was actually a funny blog post. It was how to have good dinner table conversation over the holidays with relatives. And one of the questions that I hadn't actually thought of it this way, but you can ask yourself, what if I'm wrong? Right? Yeah, I believe I think this this is the way things should be. But what if I'm wrong? Well, that's a really important question we should all ask. In fact, you think about people who've had to make great decisions, whether in strategy and war business or managing whole empires and countries. Well, before you make a decision, you really want to ask that question what if I'm wrong? What are the consequences of this being wrong? And I think we all have experienced the very clear problem of over the past few years, a lot of influential people not even having an inkling that they could be wrong, let alone asking the question what if I'm wrong? And that the consequences of them being wrong could be far greater damage than the benefits of them being right. It's always a case where I think the good quality thinking starts on ourselves.

Rebecca: We ask with humility if that's the question we're asking.

Andrew: Exactly. And then once we've gone through, then we can extend that and maybe challenge other people and say, well, what if you're wrong? You have to start with ourselves.

Rebecca: And then we need a lesson in tactfulness.

Andrew: Right.

Rebecca: So we are getting a little long, which I can listen all day, but let's talk about logic for a moment. It's a subject that used to be covered in school and isn't now. And I think sometimes logic to people is just what makes sense to me.

Andrew: Yes, well, humans have been trying to study what makes something true or correct or reliable for a very long time. No one has come up with anything extraordinarily new or different in this field. And so the fundamentals have always been there and can be learned. But like you said, it's very rare that you would find, say, a middle school student in almost any institution. I mean, apart from, say, a classical school that was advertising themselves that way. It would be very rare for a student to have a book with the word logic on the COVID And yet I've got about four books on my shelf that are all at least 100 years old that all, say, Logic. Somewhere in the title one is just titled Logic Why People Used to Think it was important to be able to understand syllogistic thinking, which is premise A, premise B, therefore premise C must be true. Can we be certain that premise A is true? Can we be certain that premise B is true? And if so, we can be certain that premise C is true. But almost all fallacies are the result of a false premise or a use of logic that is not well founded. People making assumptions and kids like logic. The problem if you teach a kid logic, they're going to use it against you. But that's a good thing. And when I watch kids who came through kind of a classical approach in education, they read some good and great books, they've taken a year or two of logic. They maybe have a foundation of grammar of some sort. Those kids just naturally think better than their peers who don't have that. What are the tools for thinking grammar, which would include vocabulary and syntax? We talked about that logic, which is the ability to parse ideas. And when I taught logic for three years, I didn't study it in school. And what I noticed as I was teaching is I started to listen differently. And I'd hear some YouTube or somebody speaking or I'd read something and I would start looking for, okay, where's the syllogism here? What's the premise or the premises that are being laid out? And are these actually supporting the conclusion, and is there support for these premises being true? And I just became a much more objective and although I hate the word critical in the true sense, listener and reader, because of my trying to teach a bunch of teenagers formal logic, it has a tremendous value. And I would encourage all of your listeners to look for something, even if it's a start, which is a real simple little book like The Fallacy Detective or something that just helps tune people to it. One of my favorites is Classical Academic Press, and I don't know if it's available through your charter school or not, but they have two books, one called The Art of argument, and the other one called Argument Builder. And these two address different aspects of using logic in communication. And so you can have the greatest rhetorical skills in the world, but if your arguments are full of fallacies, it's not going to be effective in what you're trying to accomplish generally.

Rebecca: Well, I know that I have a long list of things I want to think through and possibly change a little how we are approaching some of the aspects of my kids education. And I always am inspired when I'm always inspired to go deeper when I've listened to one of your podcasts or talks. So I really appreciate that and I thank you so much for joining us today. And listeners, I want you to know that two weeks after this podcast airs, andrew is going to come back and host a webinar exclusively for our schools. So I hope that you will mark your calendars for March 2 at 02:00 P.m. And maybe you can tell us a little bit more, Andrew, what this involves cultivating language arts preschool through high school.

Andrew: Oh, yeah, it's one of my favorite talks. And what I do is I basically take the four arts of language listening, speaking, reading, and writing. And then I go through five developmental stages. So preschool, primary, elementary, middle, and high school. And I kind of say, what can you do at all these different developmental stages to cultivate listening skills, to cultivate speaking skills, reading and writing. And so it's a very broad picture, but there are a lot of good specific suggestions built in so that parents really with children of any age can benefit, and a lot of parents have children of various ages. So, yes, I'll look forward to doing that. I see it on my calendar, March 2, Sequoia Charter Alliance.

Rebecca: And am I correct that families are able to interact with you to a degree during that webinar?

Andrew: I would assume so. I guess it would depend on whose platform we're using. If we're doing it with big marker, yeah, there's a chat box and a Q and a box. And I'm always feeling like one of the best things about doing a live event is that there are opportunities for people to share, ask questions, make it meaningful in a more personal way.

Rebecca: So, families, I hope that you will watch for that link, that you will tune in on March 2 at 02:00 P.m. To interact with Andrew and hear his talk about cultivating language arts. Thank you again and I really enjoyed this conversation. I'm honored that you were willing to come and talk to us today on the Sequoia Breeze.

Andrew: Well, I have had a great time, and if it's something you'd like to do again, I'm sure I would too.

Rebecca: Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us today on the Sequoia Breeze podcast. I hope that this has been a breath of fresh air for your home school as always, I'm your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Please don't forget to join us. Sequoia grow families for the webinar on March 2 with Andrew Pudewa. It will be an event not to be missed.