The author writes that his experience in teaching has taught him that the perfect text simply does not exist, however the closest approximation to perfection lies in the direction of the classical world. Hal McDonald says that he cannot see how one can teach rhetoric without passing through pedagogical territory first cleared by Aristotle, Quintilian, Erasmus, and the like, any more than one can teach physics without covering the ideas of Galileo, Newton, and Kepler, even if these luminaries are never mentioned by name. Recognizing the serious need for freshman composition, McDonald believes that the classical approach to composition holds great promise as a pedagogical paradigm, and that the trivium is the heart and soul of the classical pedagogical tradition. He then names the trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric as the ideal curriculum for a classically-based freshman composition course. This curriculum offers students both a systematic method for processing new information, academic or otherwise, and a collection of practical tools with which to both establish and communicate connections between this information and the world in which they live. That being said, the freshman curriculum entails a large volume of unfamiliar material that must be processed by first-semester freshmen in 15 weeks. This article provides a doable learning model to accomplish that goal.