Andrea Lipinski is the Director of Apprenticeship for the CiRCE Institute, where she also graduated as a Certified Master Teacher. She currently teaches The Lost Tools of Writing to teachers and students across the nation through the CiRCE Institute Online Academy. She is a co-author with Andrew Kern on A CiRCE Guide to Reading. While joining the Institute, she homeschools her sons.
Previously, Andrea has organized multiple training events for hundreds of teachers as well as tutored public, private, and homeschooled children. Believing in parents teaching their children, she served as a State Manager of Texas for Classical Conversations for 3 years. With a background in communication disorders, she consulted with parents of special needs children, taught in a university model private school, and led a multi-grade Christian classical cooperative that cultivates the seven liberal arts. Andrea enjoys discussing literature and mathematics with children and teachers as they together strengthen their faculty of truth perception. She and her knight in shining armor husband, David, are homeschooling their teenage sons in Central Texas.
Since the quality of one's life is determined by the quality of one's questions, how do we nurture inquiry in our students? How could our lesson planning include seeking out the answers to our students' questions? What can we do to help our students form their own questions? With any curricular book, including this skill nurtures restful lessons.
“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts," wrote CS Lewis in Abolition of Man. When we read, our minds seek answers to questions with a predictable order. By permitting our minds the space to answer these questions early, our minds are calm, receptive, and intrigued. Answering these questions irrigates our minds so the seeds of the story may grow our imaginations. What questions do our minds need answered first so that we can perceive the author's story?
Children are souls to be nurtured and not products to be measured, so how do we nurture wisdom and virtue with the assessment we offer? What do the grades we assign teach our children? What should we look for when we assess? Might we need to also assess our lessons?
