Homeschool curriculum
The Benedict Year
A 36-week homeschool year for ages 10 to 13. It walks the map of the disciplines in order, from reading and number up to worship, with Mr. Benedict’s school from Trenton Lee Stewart’s novels as its method and Mr. Curtain’s Institute as its warning.
The essays’ map says it is a map, not a course. This is one course through it, and any order that keeps the arrows would do as well. Parents should start with the page for parents: the essays were written for adults, and some need a decision before they are read aloud.
A second track runs beside it for a child of about thirteen: Reading Backwards from the Pascha, a year of Scripture read from the Easter Vigil, week by week, ending in confirmation.
How the year works
The year runs 36 weeks in twelve units of three weeks, one for each discipline on the map, taken in the map’s own order so that nothing is studied before what it draws on. It is the spine of the school day, about two hours of humanities, science, logic and faith. Daily mathematics, spelling and handwriting carry on beside it in whatever programme the family already uses.
Mr. Benedict’s method is how it teaches. He did not recruit the children who knew the most answers. He set puzzles that could only be solved by thinking, rewarded the honest answer over the clever one, and sent his children out as a team whose gifts covered each other’s weaknesses. So every week here opens with a puzzle, ends with a test of the Benedict kind, and is done together.
L.I.V.E. is the warning. Mr. Curtain’s Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened trains children to repeat what they are given, rewards them for it, and hides its real messages inside its lessons. Each unit names the Institute habit its discipline guards against, and the child practises spotting it.
The map gives each unit its rule. Every discipline on the map gives one kind of answer: what is read, computed, found, made, dated, understood, said by analogy, taught, judged, supplied, enacted, witnessed. A unit is three weeks spent learning to tell that kind of answer from the others.
The end first. The end comes first in intention and last in execution (Thomas, I-II q. 1 a. 1 ad 1). Each unit adds one answer to “what is it for?” and one way of reading a graph. The map the child draws in Unit 2 stays on the wall all year: grey lines for what draws on what, gold lines for what is for. By the end the gold lines leave the map.
A week
| Day | Block | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | The puzzle | A riddle, code or problem that opens the week’s question, worked before anything is explained |
| Tuesday | The book | The Benedict Society novels, read aloud or alone, with the week’s questions |
| Wednesday | The discipline | The lesson proper: something to do in the unit’s kind of answer |
| Thursday | The essay | In each unit’s second week, the essay read aloud and talked over, or in a gap unit the child’s own essay; in the other weeks, a project day |
| Friday | The test | A Benedict test: a question hidden in a question, an honesty question, a team problem, and spotting the Whisperer |
A unit
- Week 1, the kind of answer. What this discipline answers, and how it knows. Mostly puzzles and things to do.
- Week 2, the essay. The parent reads the essay first, then reads it aloud or retells it. Where the map has a gap, the child writes into it: a short essay of their own in a borrowed voice, as the site’s essays are written.
- Week 3, the case. One worked case that shows the unit’s rule doing its work, then a short piece of writing.
A suggested strand: the workshop, from Nand to Tetris
For a child who takes to it, the year can carry a second thread: the workshop, Part I of Nand to Tetris, the course by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken in which you build a working computer from one kind of logic gate. At the end, the computer the child built runs a program the child wrote. It takes apart a gap that only seems real until you look at it, the one between the machines and the spirit: a computer built from NAND gates is not magic and not a mind, but matter given an order by a maker, and what it is for is in none of its parts.
Each project walks beside the units whose kind of answer it shows, week by week, with the course’s free lectures and its online IDE: no account, no install. It is optional, and takes about an afternoon a week. Start with the setup guide, written to the child.
| Project | Beside | Watch |
|---|---|---|
| Project 0 · The workbench | Unit 1 · Reading · weeks 1–3 | 5 lectures, about 27 min |
| Project 1 · The gates | Unit 2 · Number, Unit 3 · Nature · weeks 4–9 | 8 lectures, about 128 min |
| Project 2 · The adders | Unit 4 · Making · weeks 10–12 | 6 lectures, about 66 min |
| Project 3 · Memory | Unit 5 · Memory · weeks 13–15 | 6 lectures, about 84 min |
| Project 4 · The machine’s language | Unit 6 · The Person, Unit 7 · Being, Unit 8 · God · weeks 16–24 | 10 lectures, about 187 min |
| Project 5 · The computer | Unit 9 · The Act, Unit 10 · The City · weeks 25–30 | 6 lectures, about 95 min |
| Project 6 · The assembler | Unit 11 · Law · weeks 31–33 | 8 lectures, about 123 min |
| The last weeks · The machine runs | Unit 12 · Worship · weeks 34–36 | — |
All 49 lectures of Part I come to about 11 hours 50 minutes, or about twenty minutes a week.
Term 1 · The word and the world weeks 1–12
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Unit 1 · weeks 1–3 · Read
Reading
The advertisement, the tests, and sentences with two readings; the child writes the essay the map is still missing.
A gap on the map: the child writes into it
-
Unit 2 · weeks 4–6 · Computed
Number
Morse code, the chess problem from the tests, and why order comes before measure.
A gap on the map: the child writes into it
-
Unit 3 · weeks 7–9 · Found
Nature
The tile room, Foucault’s pendulum, and Galileo: a finding settles a fact that no censure could.
A gap on the map: the child writes into it
-
Unit 4 · weeks 10–12 · Made
Making
Kate’s bucket, a camera obscura, and the Whisperer: what a maker can give and what he cannot.
A gap on the map: the child writes into it
Term 2 · The person and God weeks 13–24
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Unit 5 · weeks 13–15 · Dated
Memory
Mr. Benedict’s life in order, Herod’s banquet, and a forged letter caught by its dates.
Essay: Half of Nothing
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Unit 6 · weeks 16–18 · Understood
The Person
The ladder of beings, the phone feed beside the Whisperer, and Mr. Benedict asleep.
Essay: The Filler of Voids, The Score
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Unit 7 · weeks 19–21 · Said by analogy
Being
One word in three senses, and why God is not the top rung of the ladder.
A gap on the map: the child writes into it
-
Unit 8 · weeks 22–24 · Taught
God
Rank, form and date; Christ in the carriage; the Immaculate Conception before and after 1854.
Essay: Christ in the Carriage
Term 3 · The act and the common life weeks 25–36
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Unit 9 · weeks 25–27 · Judged
The Act
The prisoner’s dilemma, a market you could send a child to, and the trolley.
Essay: Of Divers Weights, The Meekest Man That Ever Ate in Hall
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Unit 10 · weeks 28–30 · Supplied
The City
Who is responsible for what, the senate at Capri, and judgments only those responsible can supply.
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Unit 11 · weeks 31–33 · Enacted
Law
House rules and their reasons, a plate of ice, and the day a law begins to bind.
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Unit 12 · weeks 34–36 · Witnessed
Worship
Matter and form, the white rectangle, and the words of baptism.
The Benedict Year is offered for families to use and adapt. It draws on The Mysterious Benedict Society novels by Trenton Lee Stewart (Little, Brown) but is not connected with the author or his publishers; buy or borrow the books. The essays it uses are personal essays, not legal advice and not teaching on behalf of any tribunal, diocese or society I serve.
Public domain I have dedicated this page to the public domain under CC0 1.0. Copy it, change it, translate it, print it and share it, for any purpose, without asking. Quotations from other writers keep their own terms.