Our history and debate notebook will serve as a concrete tool attending to the higher purpose of structuring and organizing our thoughts for this coming year. An ever-expanding timeline, notes from weekly readings, and presentation research will be organized and kept in this notebook.
Below are some notes and suggestions for organizing your notebook:
- Timeline from weekly reading
- Notes from weekly reading
- Presentation and debate research
Here are details on each section to help you as you structure your history and debate notebook.
Timeline:
Building a comprehensive timeline!
Timelines aren’t just for Foundations age students! Challenge students continually expand their understanding of history through this year’s readings and by building (or continuing to add to) their own timeline.
Consider keeping your timeline in Excel for maximum flexibility of inserting and moving around events and people as you progress through the year. The core of this year’s timeline focus will be taken from A Patriot’s History of the United States study. Those students that took Challenge II last year should add these dates, peoples, and events to the timeline they began last year.
Timeline - integration note: Expand your timeline to include philosophers from Consequences of Ideas, Shakespeare’s plays, events and people from our Latin this year, Caesar and Cicero. This allows students to see the bigger picture of history, language, literature, and ideas that shape culture and respond to culture.
Each Challenge level has an inspired “logos”, or governing 
idea or truth, that integrates our studies and readings for the program year. Challenge I tends to revolved around the idea of freedom; Challenge II around choices; Challenge III around consequences. In Challenge III, we’ll explore the idea of consequences through our studies of literature, language, philosophy, logic, chemistry, math, and more. Through our discussions, we’ll be examining consequences and its relationship to the virtues of understanding and wisdom.
Notes:
In this section of your notebook, these notes are primarily from the American History readings. These notes will be a great reference for you as you write you essays and prepare your presentations this semester.
Presentation and Debate research:
Every five weeks students are to prepare a presentation or debate. Extra research for your presentations can go into this section of your notebook.
