Marc Hays
Classical Conversations
Marc Hays has been married to Jamie for 20 years. They have 6 children: a single, a double, and a triple. Yep, that’s right—triplets and twins. They have been home educating since 1999 and a part of Classical Conversations since 2010. Marc serves as the Lead Curriculum Developer for Classical Conversations. He also directs a Challenge I program in middle Tennessee. His lifetime aspirations are subsumed under one prayer: “Thy Kingdom come; Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.” A secondary goal is to be his great-grandchildren’s Challenge director. He is confident that the primary goal will come to pass. He hopes he is blessed with the secondary one as well.
Workshops from Marc Hays ( may vary by event location )
Analogies for All of Us
Using the classical form of “A is to B as C is to D,” a person can discover and name a myriad of relationships between himself and his world, his neighbors, and his God. Incorporating the simplicity of this Aristotelian form, Classical Conversations MultiMedia has produced a resource that walks students through analogies: students move from analogies of the way words sound, to analogies of categories of meaning like synonyms/antonyms and genus/species, to analogies of ideas that shape fables, parables, psalms, and proverbs.Since all of these relationships lead from human cognition to human communication, the analogies lessons do not end like a typical standardized test. Instead, each category of analogical thought leads to the figures of speech that correlate with each category (e.g., “similar sounds” leads to “alliteration” or “assonance”), and the consideration of stories leads the students to tell their own stories using the forms they have just considered and practiced.
Practicing the Five Common Topics
“Definition, comparison, relationship, circumstance, authority--these are the five common topics. ‘Five’ because there are five of them. ‘Common’ because they are common, as opposed to specialized. They apply to anything and everything under the sun (and over it). ‘Topics’ because they are places we go to learn information. Each topic results in simple questions that you can learn to ask over and over again throughout the school day (and before and after school) to help your children learn to investigate for themselves.