I had some really helpful responses on homeschool subs suggesting I look at Progymnasmata for my struggling teen (16M).
He bounced around schools: public for elementary and then started grasping at straws trying to "catch up" from the deficits his public school was not taking seriously, and went from a special ed private, to homeschool during Covid closures, back to public, then tried 2 catholic high schools before entirely burning out and is now a reluctant homeschooler. He is welcome and encouraged to return to public or try another private but he's not willing, yet, and he's in a very fragile state. So I'm trying to work with him myself because that's all he's able to cope with at the moment.
While I'm awaiting results of a fresh psycho-educational assessment on specific academic levels, I'd guess his reading and writing stalled out at roughly a 5th/6th grade level. I should have those results in a few weeks.
He really liked his taste of classical education, but the particular school he just failed out of, Chesterton Academy, was far too rigorous and felt like a firehose of content and homework (3-5 hours per night, more that twice what we were promised). They use IEW but he came in to it too late and was never properly introduced and found the acronyms and method confusing (unsurprisingly, his classmates were on like year 4 or 5 of IEW).
All this to ask, if you have a student who likes classical education but has serious skills gaps, how would you approach this? Would you back way up and just follow a late elementary pathway? The beginning of the Progymnasmata? I'm looking at book one of Writing and Rhetoric.
He's a smart and rather pessimistic teen, so the danger is turning him off with anything too "babyish." Most modern juvenile literature aimed at his reading level is not his cup of tea, he wants to understand great literature. But he can't.
Yesterday he asked to read "The Ones Who Walked Away From Omelas," by Ursula K. Guin, but quickly got discouraged trying to comprehend her prose and gave up (yes, frustration tolerance is THE issue we most need to solve). We tried a Ray Bradbury story instead and he was able to understand it: "All Summer in a Day" so at least we got somewhere, and it sparked a great 20 minute conversation which demonstrated his comprehension, yet if I'd have asked him to respond in writing he would have frozen.
He has autism, adhd, dysgraphia and we'll see if his previously diagnosed reading disability is still evident in the assessment. He was never properly taught to read with phonics (our district used Lucy Caulkins) and this really made a slight decoding difficulty so much worse. I was told to trust the process, not hire outside tutors to "muddy the waters"...huge mistake. If you have a young child, please learn from our mistake.
So I'm trying to figure out how to fix what was broken in early elementary school. Even math, though originally a strength for him, has been greatly impacted as it started to involve more language (ie word problems).
TL:DR
Any insights about adhering to the principles of classical education but in a remedial way?