Started working with the suggestions in the Bauer book, The Well Educated Mind.  Feels pretty awkward to be doing the school girl thing again after a very long time.  There's an exercise in the third chapter that encourages the reader to try to do what they have been reading about in that chapter while reading chapter four.  Awkward or not, I did give a try.  This is the stuff I should have learned in high school, but didn't.  Should've learned in college and didn't.  No use trying to figure out what happened, I didn't learn it.  Bauer's book is indeed the classical education I never had, or maybe never learned at the very least.  Getting in late, but the lights started coming on as I worked through that first exercise.  Illumination is a good thing.

I found the practice she discussed, trivium, to be very similar to lectio divina in some ways, but without the contemplation step.  Instead, the process encourages the reader to form an opinion based on what was discovered in the previous steps . I like it that she called it the "So what?" step. (47)  You know, the feeling after you have worked with something and you wonder why.  The "so what" step explores that.  And surprisingly, or it seemed so to me, using the questions suggested the so what? became an ah-hah!  

OK, that's all well and good for a chapter.  What about a full length book?  That's next.  Choose a genre and jump in.  There's fiction, autobiography and memoir, history, drama, poetry, and science as choices.  She also has this project arranged in chronological sequence.  New builds on the old idea.  Choices!  I love choices.  Have to explore those and see what would be the best fit for me now.  I doubt that poetry is the place for me to begin, but maybe it would be.  

Have to talk about note taking for a minute. DIscovered a notebook full of pages printed in what some call the Cornell format.  I liked the idea behind the layout and found it helpful.  Here's  a link to check it out if you like.   http://lsc.cornell.edu/notes.html .