Yeah, I know. Pearson sucks. But the online program she’s in now sucks more. It’s run by the county school system and the educational package they picked was the cheapest one possible. Her English lessons are ridiculous because they’re based entirely on public domain texts. She’s in 7th grade and they have had her read things like a letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison and an O. Henry story about a safecracker. The language is so archaic that she can’t parse it, and the context is so alien that she has no frame of reference. Basically, I have to go through these texts with her line by line and explain to her what each line means. And the English teacher they have assigned to this who you can meet with if you have problems basically told me yes, that’s what I will have to do.

At least the Pearson program will have texts appropriate for a kid her age.

This is from the Jefferson letter. I can barely understand it and I’ve taken college English classes.

First the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal & unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land & not by the law of Nations. To say, as Mr. Wilson does, that a bill of rights was not necessary because all is reserved in the case of the general government which is not given, while in the particular ones all is given which is not reserved, might do for the Audience to whom it was addressed, but is surely a gratis dictum, opposed by strong inferences from the body of the instrument, as well as from the omission of the clause of our present confederation which had declared that in express terms.

That paragraph has two Latin phrases. I didn’t even know what gratis dictum meant. I had to look it up.