Be Scaffold

 

Help Helpfully

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

We love our kids. Parents want their children to develop strong life skills, intelligence, and a strong academic foundation along with a healthy social and emotional framework. That’s a lot. Pressure is increased for those seeking any alternative form of education, including at home, because any gaps or lapses fall typically on one or maybe two people. It feels like a student’s success rides on our shoulders so we can feel that weight often. How do we parents help…helpfully?

Families new to home education, or a hybrid education, must overcome programming written into their thinking through their own education, namely that there is a correct progression, a scientific approach, an accredited technique, and a right system to follow when educating. If only you knew how capricious the decisions are that structure public education! If you often fear you are “doing it wrong,” you are normal but also you are stuck struggling with a false dichotomy of a “right way” and the zillions of other ways that a student can enjoy a prosperous education. This is a topic that deserves its own blog at some point but how does one help a student jump out of the old mode and into an approach that will develop their ability to become an autodidact, a self-teacher?

Especially when your student tries something new and challenging – Latin, Greek, logic, rhetoric, literature, anything – there will be a struggle to adapt to the challenge of new environments, requirements, expectations, and subject matter. This process is absolutely normal and necessary for maturation. Beginnings are inelegant things. Your student may miss some targets or even forget them altogether. You have two choices. You can take over the process and carve a hard line for the student “just this time,” hoping it will go better the next time. Alternatively, you can build scaffolding to let your student get to the tasks at hand.

A scaffold is just enough structure to help target work where needed, letting the worker gain access to tasks with autonomy and even a little peril of falling off from time to time. Once work is completed, the scaffolding goes away. Be just enough support for the worker to stand during work but no more.

What does this look like in action?

First, give the student enough time. Some families unschool – meaning every skill and subject is tackled if and when student interest arises. This can work for some, but this isn’t what I mean. By giving your student enough time, I mean avoid assigning a mountain too high to climb even by the most aggressive climber. It isn’t unusual for students to add multiple Lukeion classes to a full brick-and-mortar school schedule plus travel ball, dance, and debate. In the upper levels we see students competing over who is taking the most AP classes all while planning a summer abroad in a competitive academic program. We are proud of our accomplished students but there just isn’t enough time to always ascend the Mt. Everest of academic pursuits year after year.

Conversely, always set up deadlines. Humans, with but a handful of infuriating exceptions, thrive under pressure and procrastinate the rest of the time. There’s nothing so important or unimportant that most of us won’t find a way to procrastinate about it. As I round the corner toward my sixth decade, I still struggle. I make myself set at least three deadlines a day for major projects which is enough pressure to make myself do a fair amount. Those do-or-die marks in my day build my productivity way above just making an undefined to-do list. If every deadline can slip and slide unpredictably, it is no deadline at all. No push towards a goal, no pressure to finish, no need to succeed when classes are relatively straightforward, means much more struggle is in store when course demands increase as the years go by. I hold firm deadlines in Latin 1, so my Latin 2-7 students never have a problem.

As a student progresses into the logic stage (roughly age 13), a parent should stand back rather than sit down, figuratively speaking, when it comes to letting a student problem-solve. If that problem is setting up a weekly schedule, translating a Greek verb, or working through a writing project, parental hovering or handholding will bring growth to a stop. Whenever I get a note from a parent saying “we” spend hours every day working through an assignment, I suspect this may be the issue.

When it comes to academic handholding, what is done in love results in a significant slowdown in progress. The student is outsourcing executive skills by relying on a parent to tell him when and how to do the next thing, then the next, and then the next. At the same time, too much parent involvement in the logic stage subtly communicates that the student cannot do the task without help. This can be a difficult habit to stop because the student has become dependent and may need to regress before going forward again. The good news is that humans, especially young ones, have incredibly elastic brains and great capacity to adapt to changes. A gentle framework, firm deadlines, and enough time to finish the work will do the trick.

Latin is Different

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

I was browsing around in a Classical education online group the other day when a Latin pedagogy question came up. I know a thing or two on the subject, so I glanced at some of the responses and added a few comments since the OP asked what Latin educators find most successful. Almost 30 years teaching Latin with over 20 of those years teaching online, I’ve seen it all. Below are things I know are generally true for more people than fewer. If you are enjoying an exception to these generalizations, good for you!

Latin is now not a spoken language, even if your educator speaks some Latin with her class. The conditions necessary to emulate natural language acquisition are not accessible to all but a handful of lucky individuals. Programs in which students could experience natural language acquisition in Latin are rare, expensive, and require a commitment far beyond 5 to 7 hours a week, typical of a first year of language studies.

Perhaps you will find a true Latin immersion program. Even if your child begins such an ambitious course of study in first grade, one where students speak exclusively in Latin for all or part of a school day, they will still need to wait for intellectual maturity before they jump into the more complex pieces written by Vergil, Cicero, or Ovid, much like one normally waits until 7^th or 8^th grade to start reading more complex and weighty literature in English.

Curricula that like to call themselves immersive aren’t. They will touch on some of the principles of natural acquisition such as some deductive reasoning and a slow build in vocabulary and sentence complexity through repetition, but in the end, the student must eventually make the jump from basics to take a more grammar-based approach when it is time to move up in complexity. Some curricula and approaches disguise this short fall by limiting students primarily to late Latin such as the vulgate translations which were translated into very basic Latin as a way to communicate to the common man. The student may never know she only half-learned Latin but could go no further without taking a more logical and grammatical approach.

Latin is not Spanish, German, French, or any other spoken language in which a native-speaking relative, a summer intensive abroad, or daily class time with a native-sounding tutor can take your young learner from basic salutations to conversational ease right up until they are ready to move to a more literary version. Latin has basic salutations and the potential for short conversational exchanges, but a summer abroad speaking Latin is not only nearly impossible, it is also not the goal.

Families choose to study Latin, among many other reasons, for the wealth of benefits it offers. A careful study of Latin—and her advanced grammar—builds intelligence, analysis, grammatical mastery, expansive vocabulary, plus academic grit and patience. Learning Latin for real will teach you how to learn anything for real but this miracle is not the result of just brushing into contact with Latin and some basic conversational skills. Congratulations. Learning how to converse in basic Latin is nice but there is beneficial distinction between trying to talk about weekend plans in Latin, Italian, French, or German. Study a spoken language to go use it as a spoken language. Latin is not now a spoken language except in her daughters French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and a dozen other languages.       

When Aristotle defined the stages of intellectual development, he named three learning stages that still broadly apply today in the sense that typical human brains follow a normal progression through stages of intellectual capacity. Again, broadly speaking, most of us go from the grammar stage (really good at learning letters, numbers, basics, vocabulary), logic stage (ready to put those elements together much like a student moves from simple games to more complex chess), and rhetoric stage (when a student begins to develop that pre-frontal cortex through improved synthesis and analysis, equivalent to the final years of high school, college, and adulthood).

The term grammar (grammatikē technē) in Greek employed by Aristotle refers to a period of development best suited to mastering how you form your letters, learn to read, master basic concepts, populate your mind with all the basic essential data and a lay down a loose framework for how things work. Unfortunately, some have misinterpreted that Greek term grammatikē with our modern grammar, a system of rules that governs how language is structured.

Keen on classically educating children, parents may find their third grader deeply confused about complementary infinitives and subjunctives because that child is ready for grammatikē (distinguishing basics like what is a noun and a verb), not grammar (mastering how syntax and morphology combine to express a complex thought in a highly inflected language). Even if a grammar stage student were to pursue a course of instruction with a true natural acquisition of the Latin language, they would still be focused on essential basics until they are intellectually ready for more complexity.

A child moves into the logic stage in what most refer to as “middle” school in a modern progression primarily because their brains go through a major transformation just as their bodies do the same. Very occasionally logic kicks in early around age 10 or 11. Sometimes it waits until 14 or 15. Mostly it happens around 13 and is marked by a major change in how the student interacts with others and the kinds of questions and topics they find interesting. I usually see the transition most clearly in the types of games they like to play. They might dabble in chess before the logic stage, but now they are ready to challenge anybody as they sort out the best moves against their opponent three or four steps in advance.

When a student begins a language like Latin in this stage, they can at once grapple mentally with the grammar of an inflected language, a system in which the actual form of the word changes to show its role in the sentence. In English, we relax and trust word order, but Latin grammar is like an interlocking gear system that requires slow, careful analysis to see how one suffix affects the meaning of another elsewhere in the clause.

A student can dabble in Latin for years in his grammatikē stage as he becomes naturally comfortable with the subtle changes in a word being the subject or direct object. He might deduce changes in the verb showing tense or a personal ending. He can grow a collection of vocabulary as he makes somewhat informed guesses about how the words work together. All of this is certainly true. He, however, will not typically be ready for the next step, the actual Latin grammar, until around age 13. A year too early means mastering chapter 1 basics will seem formidably complex. The logic stage doesn’t remove the effort needed to learn a new language, but it does make it possible if not actually fun once the rules of the decoding game are learned.

It is a common phenomenon for students who “studied” Latin for 3 or 4 years prior to age 13 to align cognitively with peers who just cracked open their first Latin textbook two months earlier. Certainly, by the end of the first semester of a decently rigorous grammar-based approach, there is no real distinction between how well a new-to-Latin student performs when compared to one with years of experience working at grammatikē technē. Is it wrong to spend those early years in Latin? No. Is it ok to start for the very first time at around age 13? Yes.

Any spoken language should be started as early as possible in a form that is as close as possible to true immersion/natural acquisition that time and budget can allow. Latin (and Classical Greek, for that matter) can rapidly advance even when started afresh as the logic stage begins. The beauty of Classical inflected languages is that, once mastered, they are the base code for French, Spanish, Italian, and a half dozen languages, all while building English into a substantial and reliable life skill. Don’t skip French and Spanish. But also: don’t skip Latin. 

Deadlines First Hurt Then Help

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project, in charge of lots of things and especially Latin 1-7

The start of a new academic year at last! We enjoy having a fresh wave of new students who are (mostly) enthusiastic about their new topics and new challenges. Faculty work late nights even on weekends to coordinate a relatively easy glide into new routines for students who may be new to the world of online learning. On average, students in any entry level course will be reminded about what must be done for the first week of the semester between six to a dozen times counting class announcements given digitally, then verbally, then by email, and then--starting two weeks before the first class--the enduring syllabus which contains everything that must be done. More advanced classes get fewer reminders as expectations rise with maturity. Many classes offer a week 1 guide handout plus we always post the links to assignments in advance of semester start, sometimes with special colors, links, and notes. We want the students to succeed.  

Then faculty predictably get several emails: the student was confused! Surely nothing had been assigned this first week. Can’t there be second and third chances here?

Twenty+ years of teaching has taught us many lessons. Chief among them is the importance of a deadline, a creature so rare and endangered that ours may be the first ever seen by some. Why would a small educational company care so much about deadlines and why can’t we have more mercy on our new students who have yet to encounter a deadline out in the wild much less recognize one as their very own? Wouldn’t we have more students if we just let every deadline slip and slide?

Actually…no 

When our students first learn we hold firm deadlines, it hurts. This pain is shared (perhaps with a little hyperbole) with family and faculty as an affront! No real notifications about expectations and due dates were published! So young to earn so harsh a zero!

We get it. It is not our favorite chore to be the deadline enforcers, but if deadlines are negotiable this time, they will also be negotiable next time. The chain will be eternal. The first one that holds fast will elicit pain once more and the cycle renews indefinitely until a person who might have a brilliant academic record and great potential are held back by so humble a thing. Stuck. Instead of this simple (though relatively painful) lesson now, they will still be negotiating to avoid that hard line in the years to come while everyone else is moving forward.

Should we have a new tagline? Maybe “holding students to deadlines since 2005”?

The wonderful news about our apparent lack-of-empathy-towards-very-busy-students is that we have been doing this long enough that our first decade of students graduated college, graduate school or medical school, and are now enjoying the first decade of their chosen callings while juggling things like children and spouses and bills. 

We have never had any highly successful student email us to chide us for our ridiculous deadline policy nor given us grief about our callous high expectations. On the contrary, learning the pain of a zero in week 1 of Latin 1 meant that they took deadlines more seriously from that moment. They’d met a wall that didn’t move with a slight push. When success in a class, project, or exam was essential for their future plans, the pain of a firm deadline was a distant memory. They already knew how to tackle their own schedule and juggle multiple responsibilities. They didn’t go through this maturation in week 2 of college—when their academic scholarship was already imperiled by tardy marks in lab and missed submissions in required courses—but in week 2 of a class that they started in middle school or high school. They learned early that they alone are masters of their responses to stress and knew their way around a planner packed with challenges. That’s what made all the difference.

Lumpy Steak Smoothie

AI Writing

by Amy E. Barr with The Lukeion Project

The Lukeion Project has a zero AI usage policy meaning students who turn in AI work represented as their own work will have a bad day indeed. There’s a relatively new term for people that turn in AI work as their own: they are meat proxies. If you are a meat proxy, you turned in AI output without reading, understanding, or validating that work, existing as just a relay between the AI system and the intended recipient. You did less than nothing in that transfer of work, which is a big problem.  

Turning in stolen work is always bad. In the academic world, it is called plagiarism, a word which comes from Latin plagiarius, meaning "kidnapper". Having AI do your writing is even worse than normal theft or kidnapping because you were just a mindless relay who didn’t even bother to take the necessary steps of gluing together a few thoughts. Your mental acuity is diminished but so is your educator’s because you’ve asked them to read and “grade” the whole charade.

When the topic of AI writing comes up among students, they often mistakenly believe one “gets caught” using AI writing because their essay is just so very good! Sorry, but no this is not the case at all. Your educators don’t grow suspicious that you are a meat proxy because your writing is deeply transformative and profound. There is a very specific quality in things written by AI. People that read student work for a living can pick out those clues as easily as one finds a six-fingered person in an AI image.

AI writing has the literary qualities of a department store dummy. Everyone can tell a mannequin is supposed to represent something human wearing the appropriate clothes, but all the uniqueness and humanity visible on that chunk of plastic is perfectly midway between good and bad, thoughtful and mindless, interesting and bland. AI writing isn’t good writing. It is bland writing. If you have a delicious steak dinner with asparagus, mashed potatoes, plus apple pie, that tasty meal will leave you happy all night. If you take that same nice meal and shove it into a high-powered blender for three minutes, you’ll have a disgusting smoothie made of perfectly fine ingredients. You might still be able to consume it, but it will not be pleasant.

Some AI models have tried to outwit educators who quickly pick up on that perfectly bland, albeit grammatically correct work. Students intentionally add typical student errors and a few mangled thoughts to make it all seem more human. Great. Thanks. Now the steak smoothie has mystery lumps! Your educators don’t want to swallow that either.  

Faculty as a matter of normal practice always run written pieces through a couple different AI detector apps. We all know these are not foolproof tests but it’s a start. If your written work comes back as VERY suspicious, we run it through more checkers, online searches, and our fellow educators. If the results are still highly suspicious. You will have a bad day indeed.

Some essays come back as “maybe AI.” Again we have to do more checking and comparing. It is a lot of extra work thanks to AI. Whether your work came across as likely or maybe AI, there’s one thing YOU can do to help yourself in situations where others must grade your work. You can provide all the evidence we need to conclude you are innocent…at least until AI comes up with a new way to outsmart this technique.

If you use MSWord (or the free version by Google) you can turn on “Track Changes” before you begin writing your paper or essay. Once you turn this setting on, any changes that you make to your paper--including any edits, copy/paste, deletions, or just regular typing and spell-checking--will all show up and can be examined by your educator. If you are mainly copying and pasting long bits into your paper instead of writing, correcting, adjusting, editing (all the normal stuff), then our suspicions are confirmed. If your work looks like the fairly normal process of writing, editing, deleting, rewriting, we can all relax.

How does one turn this on? Check for yourself if you use Google. I use MSWord. You can open a new document then navigate to the Review tab (look for the “review” tab in the toolbar at the top of the window) and then select “Track Changes.” The icon looks like a pencil and paper. Any time you make any changes, it will track them. Now evidence of a real human doing real writing is handy and available if and when needed.

If you use this technique and are ever accused of using AI by anyone grading your work, you have the right evidence to prove you completed the task for yourself and also the proof that allows us to restore faith in your work as a student.

Unfortunately, in the years ahead education will continue to be in turmoil thanks to AI. While you may have some educators who encourage the use of AI, you will have an even larger percentage that want you develop your ability to read, analyze, and write while you still have the opportunity and luxury to do so. Outside of brick-and-mortar classrooms requiring hand-written in-class essays, we will all be burdened with the need to verify that only a truly human composition sits in front of us for a real grade.  

4 MORE Important College Skills

Learn the Keys to Communication

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Ever make plans for a special feast and then arrive at the store without your shopping list? You’ll remember the major items but a nagging fear you’ve forgotten something will follow you home. Navigating the final educational years with your high school student can feel like this. Even with a mapped out transcript, you’ll often be plagued by the concern you’ve forgotten some vital lessons.

A well-rounded academic-focused transcript is splendid. A good high school check-list insures students take the requisite classes and complete those necessary credit hours. You’ll soon learn getting into college is only the first little battle. Your high school student also needs to develop proficiencies to help her stay in college for the long haul. Here’s a short list of skills that must be practiced throughout high school to guarantee a smoother path through college. If you’ve failed to work these into your curricula: Now is the time to add these to your learner’s existing studies.

1. Note taking

Home educated students are rarely great at note-taking unless they have intentionally sought lecture format courses. As much as parent educators love to offer lively, interactive, hands-on, out-of-the-box teaching opportunities, most first and second year classes at college will have a traditional lecture format with large lower level course sizes. I was once a TA for a 700-student mythology course! Will your student be good at note taking?

Conventionally schooled parents may have spent many youthful hours in lecture-format high school classes and wrongly take this skill for granted. Note-taking must be learned, practiced, and perfected. Your student can start to master the skill while reading or listening to sermons at church, vlogs, or podcasts. Later have him participate in lecture-based courses in which he is responsible for mastering what he hears. Don’t let college be your child’s first high-stakes note-taking experience.

The best students know that note-taking is more than just busy work and transcription skills. Good note-takers are also active listeners. The practice of organizing and processing data during a lecture is the first huge boost to learning that data. The second sensible move is to train a student to always recopy her notes right after each class. If she does so, she’ll seldom do poorly on an exam. Fleshing out ideas right after a lecture means far more than just neat notebooks. If she is diligent, a good note-taker will process the data a second or even third time without spending much extra time on the class. By the time she must prepare for the test, she’ll already have much more information neatly stored in her long-term memory. The best way to study for even the most difficult topic is to take notes, recopy those notes, and then copy them a third time. By then, recall will be a breeze.

2. Typing

Parents might be hunt-and-peck typers with short-form abbreviated texting habits. If this describes you, this will likely describe your students. Take some important time in early middle school actively working on typing accuracy and speed. There are several really fun apps on the market to help build both. No student should still be using the hunt-and-peck approach to typing nor the “look at every keystroke” method by the time they go to college so why wait that long? Get those skills going before high school so that it comes naturally when typing is needed the most.

3. Time management

Teens are notorious for being poor time managers while others seem on-the-ball at birth! Some kids are born behind schedule, always rushing to finish projects, chores, and responsibilities. But the secret is basically this: Time management can’t be taught so much as modeled and practiced through personal experience. Parents naturally want to take up the mental load of constantly reminding kids who have a more relaxed approach to life’s schedules instead of letting their children quickly learn what happens when time is not managed adequately.

Start early and never stop stressing the importance of getting things done on time without drama but resist the temptation to DO the managing. Raise the bar for high school students. Give your child the chance to work on a variety of long and short term projects while navigating a normal schedule. State your expectations up front, set firm due dates, and be prepared to live with the consequences of occasional failure without drama. Mom and dad often sabotage real growth in time management skills by softening the blow of real consequences, especially when consequences impact grades. Don’t rationalize offering flexible deadlines to save your learner’s GPA. Poor time management skills in high school will eventually damage college, career and interpersonal success. Start early (well before transcripts are at risk) and stick to your stated schedule and your stated repercussions.

The best students know that good time management will let them pack more into each organized and prioritized day.  If they put goals, school projects, exercise, spiritual development and relationships ahead of interruptions, time-wasters, games, and short-form content. They’ll experience the fullness that high school and college have to offer during truly free time opportunities once they know how to finish obligations first, not last. Encourage students to volunteer for community service projects or major family ventures in which they take leadership in planning and implementation. They can see how time management skills pay off while working in service to others. Ever wonder why colleges like to see community service on a high school transcript? Time management is one big reason.    

4. Mature Communication Skills

Each semester I teach several hundred home educated high school students live online. I encourage them to communicate questions and concerns about the material at hand rather than asking mom or dad to do this chore. If they don’t understand something or need help, they must communicate that to me instead of having a parent become a translator. When I hear their questions, I get to know them, and they learn to express themselves and even advocate for themselves if they think I need to revisit a score or grant some type of extension. The whole process makes them better students while I become a better educator.

Not every student develops even these communication skills. I will sometimes have a student for 2, 3, or even 4 years of Latin. Out of shyness or due to limited experience in self-advocation, they never step up. Consequently, I never communicate with that student directly. How sad when such a student asks for a college recommendation! All I can do is rave about good grades. College recommendation forms don’t ask teachers much about grades because that’s what transcripts are for. Top colleges and universities want to know how well a student interacts with teachers and students, how well she reacts to adversity, his warmth of personality, her sense of humor, his leadership qualities, character, and extracurricular accomplishments. Colleges especially want to know if a student responds well to setbacks. If I’ve never had a chance to communicate with a student, a whole letter about good grades is worse than no recommendation at all.  

The best students overcome a shy or tentative nature by learning to interact with trustworthy adults, educators, youth leaders, and coaches. The best parents not only encourage their children to interact with adults but will insist that their child do all the talking and negotiating when there is a question or dispute. Once at college, professors will interact with students as adults or quickly grow to discount students who don’t act like adults. Parents should never communicate with college professors (or potential employers) on behalf of their students. If you have a shy student, make sure the communication skill has been well rehearsed before freshman orientation begins.