The Course

What This Is

The cohort is a year-long humanities sequence built around five strands: calculus, theology, literature, Western civilization, and a senior thesis. The Thursday meeting provides structure, discussion, accountability, and collaborative practice. It does not replace home instruction. In this model the parent is the primary teacher and evaluator, and the meeting supports the work already being done at home.

The Weekly Meeting

Each Thursday meeting combines:

Discussion of the assigned readings, with guided analysis of the major texts and historical themes.
Student writing, work-sharing, and collaborative exercises.
Debate, presentation, or seminar-style discussion.
Check-ins on the senior thesis.

Students arrive having completed that week’s readings and any assignment due. Deliverables are due at the Thursday meeting of the week listed in the schedule; due dates are final deadlines, and work may always be completed early.

Workload

Plan on 10 to 15 hours a week outside the Thursday meeting — roughly two hours of calculus, five to eight hours of reading across theology, literature, and Western civilization, and two to five hours on the thesis and writing. The biggest variable is reading speed, and the easiest adjustment is in writing quantity. If the course load feels like too much, cut the length of the writing assignments.

The writing is spread across the year rather than bunched, and nothing falls due in the college-application weeks. The dates in this guide are deadlines, not start dates.

The thesis requires weekly work throughout the year. It’s possible to complete the checkpoint and still reach the rough draft at Week 25 without having what you need to write a good paper. Parents should check in on the thesis weekly, and expect real progress between checkpoints, not only at them.

Roles

Instructor. Prepares and leads the weekly meeting, guides discussion of the readings, facilitates presentations and debates, supports the thesis process, and maintains this shared schedule of readings, topics, thesis checkpoints, and assignments. The instructor supplements home instruction; he does not replace the parent as teacher and evaluator.

Parent-teacher. Oversees weekly preparation, sets the final amount of assigned work, reads the student’s writing and responds to it, and keeps whatever record of the year the family’s transcript requires. The cohort does not grade or score anything; assignments come with lengths and standards, not marks. Parents are encouraged to read the material alongside their student and to use this guide as the shared framework for instruction at home.

Student. Completes regular weekly preparation outside the meeting — reading, note-taking, written responses, and thesis work — and arrives ready to discuss and present.

Five Strands

Theology. Biblical theology, Christian doctrine, and close theological reading. The first eleven weeks read Graeme Goldsworthy’s Gospel and Kingdom, which teaches students to read the whole Bible as one unfolding story — God’s people, in God’s place, under God’s rule. The Old Testament reading runs underneath it from Week 1, walking forward chronologically as God’s preparation of the world for Christ. The second semester reads Matthew, Acts, Romans, Hebrews, Philippians, 1 Peter, and Revelation, beside Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. Throughout, students read Scripture attentively and in context, trace the biblical covenants across the canon, and learn to interpret each text in light of its place in the story of redemption.

Literature. The foundational works of the Western literary tradition, with an emphasis on epic poetry. Students read difficult primary texts with patience and attend to literary form, genre, character, and rhetoric, and to the moral, philosophical, and theological visions of the works. The sequence runs Hesiod → the Iliad → Sophocles → the Odyssey → the Aeneid.

Western Civilization. A single chronological narrative of the West, read through Jackson Spielvogel’s Western Civilization: Volume I: To 1715 including discussion of the primary-source documents embedded in Spielvogel’s text. Emphases: connecting “secular” history with redemptive history; understanding chronology, context, and cause and effect; distinguishing historical fact, interpretation, and argument; and tracing the major civilizations, institutions, conflicts, and ideas of the West.

Mathematics. A year of single-variable calculus read through Silvanus Thompson’s Calculus Made Easy, in the Thompson–Gardner edition. Running underneath the whole strand is the student-created calculus notebook, begun in Week 1 and kept to the end: a bound record of notation, definitions, formulas, worked examples, and every assigned exercise. There is no test in this strand and no separate deliverable; the notebook is the work, and it is the thing to look at to see how the year went. It is described in full in Writing Assignments.

Senior Thesis. A year-long research and writing project culminating in a 4,000–6,000-word paper (~15–20 pages) and a public presentation and defense. The thesis has its own detailed guide — see The Senior Thesis — and its own track in the schedule.