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Most
children today are bored
in traditional school. The demands are so light and the materials they
work
with are so unchallenging, that the students simply can not maintain
any
enthusiasm.
With bright children especially, a belief that working hard makes no
difference,
that the material they are required to study is of no value, or that
their
teachers don't even bother to check their work all tend to discourage
them
from even trying. Many just give up. A worse problem
is
the major universities expect incoming students to have knowledge and
skills
that
the public schools simply do not teach anymore.
The canon on
which Western Civilization
is based is vast. With inexperienced and unqualified teachers in most
school
systems, with underfunded schools and overcrowded classrooms, kids
don't
have much of a chance to learn the basics let alone the classics. I was
shocked when I started teaching in Santa Barbara at how little the
children
knew.
To succeed in a
competitive academic environment, a person simply
must know how to write. I emphasize writing
skills
with my students. Though we work extensively with vocabulary
building and grammar skills,
they are not our primary focus. A student's learning to apply such
skills
is one of the principal aims of education.
I use classic texts from The Great Books and from the Advanced
Placement (AP) reading list as the basis of the curriculum.
Many local schools have removed these classics from their curriculums.
These are local school board choices which, although well meant, mean
that
your child will not experience the AP books that colleges expect them
to
have read. The effort here at Oxford is to stretch your child to the
limit of his
or her academic potential.
All kids are
gifted. I make it my job to
find
and nurture those gifts. We also have
fun.
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