These lovely ladies are LEMI’s two founders, Aneladee Milne and Tiffany Earl. Aneladee is no longer with LEMI but she still helps with trainings.

Here are some meaningful bits that I caught at LEMI Training last week. If you don’t know what LEMI is, it’s basically a company that teaches parents how to facilitate scholar phase for their youth/teenagers. LEMI stands for Leadership Education Mentoring Institute. You can read the story of its founding by Tiffany Earl in the book The Student Whisperer. Every summer LEMI holds trainings in Utah, Arizona, and other places to teach parents how to teach LEMI’s “scholar projects” which are classes on Shakespeare, history, math and science, leadership, writing, and world leaders who have moved the cause of liberty.

Another company, called New Commonwealth Schools, helps parents learn how to set up a commonwealth school. LEMI used to teach people how to do that but sold that part of the business to a TJED mom, Brenda Haws. Brenda was in the class I took, to learn how to teach the Key of Liberty and Sword of Freedom classes. Key of Liberty is about the Revolutionary War and the founding of America. The Sword of Freedom class is all about the War Between the States.

I love and hate the liber cycle! It can be painful but ultimately it’s a good thing! It’s the path of excellence instead of mediocrity. LEMI’s scholar projects aren’t just about academics but to teach scholar youth the liber cycle.

• I met a lady from Oklahoma who has a site for celiac disease. I will find out the URL and post it soon.
• LEMI started in 2000 with one place, or pod, offering a class, or what they call “scholar project.” It was TJYC, which stands for Thomas Jefferson Youth Certification. The class was in Cedar City and included youth ages 12 and up. Tiffany said she learned that was too broad of an age range, because she was mixing practice scholars with apprentice scholars. 70 locations in the U.S. now offer LEMI classes.

These are the trainers for LEMI who taught how to teach the various scholar projects.

• LEMI is changing the name of TJYC next year

• Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain was someone many people admired in the Battle of Gettysburg. He helped hold Little Round Top to keep the Confederate from getting through Gettysburg to Washington D.C. A story about him is in the book, The Butterfly Effect. The author claims that the U.S. was able to win WWII because of Chamberlain’s decision to hold the line on Little Round Top. Now I want to get the book and follow that line of logic. 

• I can do hard things, including homework, even when I didn’t expect to be doing the topics I was assigned to study.
• The Sword of Freedom class has two cool simulations: the debate between Lincoln and Douglas, with the students allowed to take whichever side they want, and the Gettysburg battle, using paintball guns.

You can watch the Muppets attempt to reenact the debate about independence in the second Continental Congress above, skip into the video about 2 min. 32 seconds. It’s easy to forget that the obvious choice, declaring independence, was not so obvious to all of the Congressional delegates.

• I don’t know as much behind the history of the Declaration of Independence as I thought I did. South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia didn’t want to declare independence at first. I think I might have known that but had forgotten it. I didn’t know the names of the delegates at the Congress other than the well-known ones: Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Hancock. I didn’t know any names of the southern delegates or what their reasons were for arguing against independence. Since then I have come home and read up in an old book called Know Your Declaration of Independence. My son and I got to participate in a simulation of the Continental Congress debate that led to the Declaration of Independence. But we chose to sit in the South Carolina delegation, so we had to argue against independence. It’s hard to be on the side that goes against what you’ve learned about your whole life. I did end up saying something halfway-smart that hadn’t been said yet, finally. We had cue cards to help us know what to say but we all had the same ones! The trainer didn’t feel like making a cue card individualized for each colonial delegation with quotes of what the actual delegates said.

Here’s one of the youth arguing for independence. She had it easy as the Massachusetts delegation. I mean, the war was already going on there by the time of the debate! My good friend KeeNan is in the background with her baby.

• Participating in the debate makes me think about today. What are the issues today that in hindsight will seem obvious as to which side to take, but aren’t obvious to some people today? What are the issues facing my country today that determine my grandchildren’s destiny for freedom or no freedom? What position should I be taking that will continue to promote freedom and self-government? What should I be studying so I can be more articulate and not feel tongue-tied in a debate? Now I feel like reading books by Thomas Woods PhD, because he is one of the few professional historians out there I agree with who is writing liberty-based books like Rollback and the Politically Incorrect Guide to American History. See http://tomwoods.com. I like to think of him as the Thomas Paine of today.

• Diann Jeppson is no longer calling the TJED Forum the TJED Forum. It will now be called The Family Forum. She wrote a paper on Family Centered Education that she passed out at the end of LEMI Training. I read the paper and liked it. I think what she was saying was that she wants homeschoolers to focus on family-centered education instead of labels like TJED, or LEMI, etc. and promote ideas and classes that build and support the family’s control over education.