Still Recuperating

As usual, I labored on Labor Day, and I'm just wrecked this week.  Yes, the exhaustion is carrying over this far into the week, but I hope I'll somehow get a renewed burst of energy today, particularly after our kung fu class tonight.  But of course, then that would mean that I'd be too wired to settle down to sleep later.  In the meantime, I suppose I could just opt for a caffeine fix.

School is going as well as I had hoped, and the deeper we get into our materials, the more pleased I am with them.  We're still relatively new to IEW, but so far, so good.  There are things about the program, however, that are rubbing me the wrong way--for instance, the composition checklist prompting you to add a who/which clause (Why is this necessary?  I urge my dd to skip it if tacking it on seems well, too tacked on), and some of the models they use aren't the best, but it's the sort of hand-holding I needed right now, so for that I'm appreciative.  I don't want to rush to make judgments either way, so I'm riding out these little annoyances for now.  I'm hoping it will all make sense eventually.  So far, it seems easier to use than I had expected.  Granted, we're using SWI-C, so I'm sure that changes things a bit.  Some reviews made it out to seem super time intensive, and perhaps it will be so later on down the road, but for now, the time commitment seems reasonable to me.

As I think I have mentioned before, we're also incorporating some of the writing guidelines Susan Wise Bauer mentions in her writing MP3's (the frequent short persuasive essays), and we are going through Anthony Weston's A Rulebook for Arguments right now for Logic/Rhetoric.  The aforementioned MP3's actually prompted me to pull out my copy of D'Angelo's Composition in the Classical Tradition, and this time, I took more than a cursory look through its content.  I love D'Angelo's explanations of the progymnasmata exercises (the clearest I've seen yet), and I'm sure I'll be incorporating these as well.  As an aside, apparently, SWB suggests using D'Angelo's book alongside Corbett's (i.e. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student).  I wonder where this leaves Kane's New Oxford Guide to Writing, which The Well-Trained Mind suggests we use after Weston's A Rulebook for Arguments?  I'm confuzled.  I think I need a nap.