To catch you up on things around Cicero’s Academy:

The bluebonnets are in blossom and so are summer plans. We have posted the summer workshop schedule. We begin the summer with the younger students and “Developing the Intermediate Writer,” a workshop designed to help students who have mastered core skills in sentences and paragraphs and help them transition to writing essays and working with bigger ideas of their own choosing. We then move to “Essay Writing and Introduction to Persuasion,” a workshop aimed at the advanced middle school and high school student that needs to sharpen the skills of making an argument. The schedule closes in late July with “Essay Writing for the College Bound,” a workshop aimed at timed writings in the style of the SAT test and Advanced Placement tests. While there is a bit of change afoot in whether the writing portions of the SAT will be required in the future, a quick Google shows that the top schools are still requiring those portions of the standard tests.

Assuming we survive all that, summer will lead to fall and we have some plans for fall as well. Learning to write requires writing consistently and internalizing all the basic parts of the writing process that we teach. We have had several students over the past few years come back for tutoring as a refresher course on the taxonomy and habits we teach. We will be offering some online lesson plans on a subscription basis, geared toward reinforcing the themes of the summer workshops. We have long wanted to move at least a portion of what we do online and this is the year to make that a reality. We will learn as we go and add more options and classes online over time.

Lastly, students have long referred to John as “Mr. T.” He warns them that he will not show up to class wearing a bad mohawk and 40 pounds of necklaces (he also worries that one day that pop culture reference will no longer work and he will be officially, hopelessly and irretrievably old). Students can now call him “Dr. T” as he finished his Ph.D. at the University of Texas in the fall. Did it feel like we went a bit silent in 2014? Writing a 200 page book on globalization and its impact on language habits will do that to you.