Goals, Paces, Years

The school I largely grew up in used the Accelerated Christian Education model. This was built around course books called ‘PACES’ (Packets of Accelerated Christian Education). Each year, you were expected to finish 12 PACEs in each of 4 subjects (plus electives); thus, an entire school ‘career’ in a particular subject was comprised of 144 PACEs. A school year was divided into quarters (at least, ours was), so you were generally expected to do about 3 PACEs per quarter (3X4=12 per year). Each quarter was, if memory serves, about 10 weeks long (because we had something like 2 months off for the summer?). This model is not unlike college, I suppose, although of course the material was at a lower academic level.

I’ve been musing on this as part of an upcoming planning process. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could think about a decade worth of work, in each of four “streams”—and then have the decades broke out into years, and the years broke out into 12 steps, of which you accomplished about 3 every 10 to 12 weeks? Obviously it’s hard to think through those kinds of goals in advance.

But perhaps it might be helpful to think — which are the four areas that I mostly feel I should focus on over the next decade - and what are the big “learning questions”, the things I don’t presently know, in each of those areas? Can I outline the learning questions in terms of which must come before the others, and therefore should be focused on first? And can I then break those learning questions down into 10 to 12 “subquestions” that I would need to devote some time to…

I probably think more in terms of learning questions than others might. Other people might think differently. But at least this gives me a way of organizing. Then I can ask, which author, which teacher, which book, would cover each of these “subquestions”?