Totally Epic

Ancient but Valuable Life Lessons

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

The first powered airplane only flew 12 seconds on its maiden voyage and the first car could only move 2 miles an hour. The first Greek epic, however, was invented even before the finishing touches were put on the Greek alphabet in which it would eventually be recorded. Homer’s Iliad, and his smash sequel the Odyssey, have been moving the world ever since, all while being composed in a form of poetry known as dactylic hexameter. 

You probably have a copy of one of these epics on your bookshelf. You may even have tried to work them into your curriculum with varying levels of success or frustration. With a little background in place, most readers quickly learn that this 3000 year-old literature still offers food for thought and potent words for modern ears.

Troy, known as Ilion/Ilium to the Greeks and Romans and Truva to the modern locals, is a real place you can visit in northwest Turkey. I worked with the excavation team at this well-fortified Bronze Age city and witnessed how most tourists climb the giant Trojan Horse replica for a fast photo before hastily leaving. The site of Troy is no Coliseum or Parthenon because its claim to fame is its destruction. Archaeological evidence suggests that something calamitous happened there around 1180 B.C. when the city was nearly leveled. The relevant parts of the archaeological site look as one might expect for a long destroyed city.

Fast forward around 400 years to find Homer, a blind Greek-speaking poet living in Ionia (western Turkey), earning his keep by reciting a larger-than-life poem about heroes and fair Helen at ill-fated Troy. After the city falls, the Greeks make their way back home. Odysseus has so much misfortune that the poet composes a second epic to cover his 10-year trip back to Ithaca. While Homer included some very reliable details, he also filled in the gaps with tidbits from his own time and a big dash of imagination. He was, after all, making a living in the story-telling trade.

By the 1800’s most scholars dismissed Homer, Troy, and the whole gang, as pure poppycock, asserting all of it had been invented by some ancient creative committee. Puffing their scholarly pipes, they wrote-off a lot of ancient literature as silly figments of antique imagination. Luckily Heinrich Schliemann, a German publicity-loving entrepreneur, got in touch with Frank Calvert who firmly believed he was living at the actual site of Troy. These two began the tradition of using archaeology to vindicate ancient literature while stuffy institutional scholars ate crow.

The Romans believed the Trojan War was their starting point as a civilization. According to tradition, Rome was founded exactly 438 years after the fall of Troy (Velleius Paterculus 8.5). One of her founding fathers, Aeneas, would lead a gang of Trojan refugees from the burning city and settle them near what would eventually become a point of argument for Rome’s namesake Romulus and brother Remus. Be sure to add Vergil’s Aeneid to your reading list if you want the whole epic picture.

The heroes of Homer’s epics lived by a code which would guide behavior from Homer to Alexander the Great.  Uninformed readers might conclude the Trojan War was about stolen Helen or lost love. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was the heroic code that would drive hundreds of Greek ships against Troy, compel Achilles to sit angrily in his tent, force best friend Patroclus to take Achilles’ place on the battlefield and push an army to blockade a city for a full decade.

C. M. Bowra summarized the heroic code this way: 

The great man is he who, being endowed with superior qualities of body and mind, uses them to the utmost and wins the applause of his fellows because he spares no effort and shirks no risk in his desire to make the most of his gifts and to surpass other men in his exercise of them. [i]

The Romans would add their own flair to the heroic code. Vergil’s Aeneas, for example, embodied Roman pietas, a virtue which admonished us to put God, community, and family first before self.

While monsters and swashbuckling adventures keep the reader happy, Homer’s Odyssey is teaching the big life lesson that we are each defined by our generosity to strangers. From prince to farmhand the rule is the same: if you treat strangers with kindness, you’ll be remembered well. Hero Odysseus also teaches us to handle trouble with long-suffering patience so that we’ll eventually make it home safe.   

Ancient epics are an important addition to your reading list. They are a gold mine for further thought and discussion if we don’t insist our kids start on them too young. I recommend waiting until your reader is in the critical thinking stage (13+) because of the weighty issues presented in these stories. Parents will enjoy reading the epics with your junior or senior high student. My favorite translations are by Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo.

Originally performed from memory and accompanied by a stringed instrument, these tales were the blockbusters of the ancient world and the backbone of ancient Classical education. I leave you with the important words of Penelope, wife of Odysseus, spurring us on to generosity, 

For how would you ever find out, stranger, whether or not I surpass all other women in presence of mind, if you sit down to dinner squalid and disheveled here in my hall?  Our lives are short. A hard-hearted man is cursed while he lives and reviled in death. But a good-hearted man has his fame spread far and wide by the guests he has honored, and men speak well of him all over the world.[ii]

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[i] C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experience, New York: 1957, pp.20-21

[ii] Stanley Lombardo, trans.,  Odyssey, Hackett Publishing Co., 2000. 19.359-367

AI is Sneakier Than You Think

Learn to Turn it OFF

By Randee Baty at The Lukeion Project

As I design my AI policy for my college students this semester, my new stand is “I don’t believe it’s inevitable that all students will use AI. I do believe it is inevitable that all students will have to have the ability to think and write clearly on their own even when no computer is available.”  That’s the stance we’ve taken against AI-completed homework from the beginning here at The LukeionProject.

Studies are already beginning to show that students using AI have a cognitive decline in their ability to complete assignments on their own. We are not willing to have that happen to our Lukeion students. We are continuing the mission we’ve had for 20 years to turn out well-trained, clear, and independent thinkers. Leave the AI for arenas other than homework.

But for students, that’s actually getting harder and harder to manage because AI has become pervasive in the digital tools we use, such as Word and Google docs, without our even knowing it. All kinds of AI are being subtly and not-so-subtly integrated into these programs. Students often truly believe that they didn’t use AI because they didn’t instigate a chat session with ChatGPT or with Copilot, but they were undermined by their own software. What can they do to prevent being accused of using tools they didn’t know they were using?  Let’s go through how to turn all of that off, something that is required when submitting homework to The Lukeion Project.

First, let’s be clear about one common program that many students use. Grammerly is AI. 100%. If you run a paper through Grammerly, you are using AI and it will show up as such. No way around that. Other programs that are supposed to help with the same types of issues, such as Quillbot, are also 100% AI. They just can’t be used for homework at an AI-free school such as The Lukeion Project. For Lukeion homework, be sure that those types of programs are not running or affecting student work.

A good rule of thumb, anything that wants to write into the homework itself should not be used. We wouldn’t let students have other people complete their homework for them and allowing these programs to do so is the same idea as letting some other person do the work. Students need to learn how to write without these crutches. Proper punctuation and sentence structure, word choice and vocabulary, level of formality and point of view, organization and development of an argument are all things we are teaching explicitly and that students have always been required to learn without digital intervention. AI tools may not be available when they need them, and students must be able to produce strong writing without them.

How to use Microsoft Word without AI:

The obvious first thing to do in Word is to turn off Copilot. Versions of Word differ from computer to computer, but to turn off Copilot on mine, the path is File-More-Options-Copilot and then I just uncheck “Enable Copilot.”  It’s easy and it stops Copilot from annoyingly asking me what I want it to draft for me when I don’t want it at all. But that’s not the end of the AI in Word.

Go back to Options and open the Proofing Menu. Go down to “Writing Style” and open the “Grammar and Refinements” menu. On that menu, leave basic things such as spell-check. That is a rule-based system. When you get down to “Clarity,” “Conciseness,” “Formality,” “Inclusiveness” “Sensitive Geopolitical References”  and “Vocabulary,”  turn all those off. Those are where Word wants to impose its will on you. These are the exact areas we’re teaching, and students should be learning to deal with them correctly on their own without Word telling them what’s right, what’s wrong, and what it prefers. Leaving them on could result in your paper showing up as AI written.

If you use Editor in Word, be sure you are only using it for spelling and light grammar corrections. Once you move into the rest of the things that Editor wants to correct for you, you are into AI.

Here’s the other problem with taking the suggestions of these programs at face value. They are often wrong or merely preferences. Each time I put something like “Write a 300-word paper…,” AI suggest I change that to “Author a 300-word paper…” or “Draft a 300-word paper…”  Those make far less sense to me than just saying “Write.”  It shows me how much control the program is trying to exert over my writing and frankly, it just makes me mad.

How to use Google docs without AI:

As with Word, basic spell check is fine. In fact, we hope students are using spell-check. That is a rule system, not AI. Keep the “show spelling suggestions” and “show grammar suggestions” on.

In the Tools menu, click on “Preferences.”  Here is where you can tell it to turn off suggestions. Different versions of docs have different looks. Mine has “Show smart reply suggestions” which I have to disable not to be getting suggestions as you write. Yours may have things such as “Writing suggestions.”  Turn that off. This is where you can also turn off things such as “Automatically correct spelling.”  I don’t mind it underlining a word that it thinks is spelled wrong, but I want to make my own decisions about correcting it or not. These rule-based tools often have problems with foreign words or proper names, so don’t let it do anything automatically. Be in charge of your own paper!

In my version of Google, I have to explicitly turn on Gemini, Google’s AI, and I just don’t. Double-check that your version does not have it turned on by default or because someone turned it on, thinking it would help. If it is making suggestions, it’s turned on and you need to turn it off on purpose. Anything that says, “Help me write,”  “make suggestions,” or auto-generates phrases or sentences must be turned off. If you see writing suggestions in light gray as you type, ignore them and figure out how to turn them off!

Smart students have been learning how to write well without AI intervention since writing began. You will too, and your assignments will be the better for having come from your brain and not a program that only knows how to search the web and pull things together from there. It’s fun to think!  Enjoy knowing that you are producing your own work that is far superior to anything an AI program could give you.

Full Effort is Not Full Credit but That’s OK

100%

By Amy Barr at The Lukeion Project

Recently one of our faculty was asked, “I’ll earn a 100% whenever I do my best, right?” What was the answer she gently offered in response? “No.” Isn’t doing one’s best good? Absolutely, working at full effort is important, but full effort does not always guarantee full credit. Let’s explore why this is the case in almost all skill acquisitions in life and why you must still put in full effort, no less.
Ever heard an inspiring story about how a person was able to lose a lot of weight to achieve a health or fitness goal or to recover from a serious illness or injury? While we often focus on the end results in which the hero enjoys success, we often do not focus on that person’s day-to-day effort. When overcoming any kind of challenge, successful people quickly come to understand that giving 100% is not the destination but the necessary—but mundane—means to achieve the desired goal. 
Consider a person recovering from a serious illness through weightlifting. She might certainly give 100% on the first day of training by lifting a tiny fraction of the weight that she will eventually lift after a year. Giving all she’s got to give will be lower and slower at first compared to last. A successful person marks goals and then works diligently towards goals with the mature understanding that victory will be enjoyed with full effort but only after many attempts, failures, and less-than-perfect days. 
If you can play a musical instrument well now, your lower-level goals (performances and recitals) started at very basic levels before they became more complex. Your earliest efforts resulted in a halting rendition of Twinkle Twinkle that only a mother could love. You must start there so that your mature talents are more impressive.
How does a fitness or musical goal compare to academic success? When learning an unfamiliar academic skill, you will be given sequential challenges to take you from introductions to more advanced levels. Of course, you should give each task 100% as you go but remember, you are new to this material. 100% effort for the first few challenges is like lifting those small beginner weights or playing Hot-Cross-Buns on your flute. Keep going. You aren’t there yet. You’ve got more to master.   
Your educator knows your goal is achieved not in simple lessons at the start but the subject mastery at the end after many lesser goals and lower levels are endured or conquered. Maybe you follow directions, format accurately, and edit well, yet your score is more mid-level than you’d prefer. You’ve worked diligently but you still have more to do as you develop your academic muscles. Keep working at 100%. You’ve only started and you have further to go.
Provided your educator understands the whole trajectory of the skills you are building, you are not just being evaluated item by item but skill by skill as you mature in the material. Unless the topic is assessed using answers that are either completely correct or completely incorrect such as studies in mathematics, expect your best efforts to be evaluated on where you sit on the trajectory of skill-building.
Learning to write well isn’t done with a single essay or even a single semester of work. You are given an essay to write, edit, and rewrite. You follow all instructions. You apply the writing tips you heard in class as well as features that you enjoy from other examples you’ve read. You put in the time, and you give 100% effort on this task. That score of 89 out of 100 can be disappointing unless you understand that you are credited for your diligence, your care with directions, how you edited, how you communicated, and also how you compare with your skills now with where your skills might be in three weeks, months, or years. You are still lifting tiny weights and playing simple songs. That’s OK!  You still have hard work to do. Keep going.   

10 Reasons Why Serious Academic Students Should Take Creative Writing

Take a Writing Detour

By Randee Baty at The Lukeion Project

Every fall here at Lukeion Project we focus on academic writing. It’s something every student will need eventually, so we offer an introduction to academic writing with our Skillful Scribbler class and a more advanced level of academic writing with our College Composition class. Academic writing has fairly rigid conventions that prescribe set forms and styles that don’t vary much among professors. It’s a style of writing that is necessary for students to know but is mainly used as they go through their academic life. In the spring, however, we offer the opportunity to do something much more creative and, for most students, more joyful and freeing: creative writing. 
Because creative writing is used less directly in classroom settings as students move into high school and college, not everyone will take advantage of the opportunity to spend a semester in this useful and engaging class. Along with the pleasure and fun it provides for those who are often overly stressed by their classes, creative writing provides true academic benefits and life skills that are definitely worth consideration for parents and students. 

Expand the Technical Mind

Creative writing expands the mind to think creatively in many different ways. They are creating new worlds, new situations, new characters, and innovative ideas that no one may have ever thought of before. Motorola’s engineer Martin Cooper directly cited Star Trek when inventing the first cell phone in 1973. What began as a creative idea in a writer’s head is now one of the most omnipresent devices on the planet. The founders of iRobot that created the Roomba vacuum acknowledge the robot maid, Rosie from the animated show The Jetsons, as one of their inspirations. (We had named our Roomba Rosie even before I knew this). Companies need workers who can solve problems by thinking outside the box. The next major invention could be lurking inside the head of one of our creative writers!

Expand Working Vocabulary

One of the most important benefits of creative writing is how it helps a student broaden their vocabulary. The class requires young authors to use language from a variety of settings, not just academic subjects. They will write about various places and times, diverse types of characters and different actions and activities. All of those require clear and understandable language that speaks directly to the reader, providing specific details. While many young writers struggle with specificity in academic writing, creating stories, plays, or poetry require specific language, and this skill is strengthened. 

Expand Communication Skills

Creative writing allows participants to explore several types of writing. Short stories, dialogue, poetry, and drama all require distinct types of thinking skills for putting the proper words on the page. These skills translate well into business writing later in life. Someone who has mastered the art of putting their entire meaning into a few lines of poetry has no problems later writing clear and effective business memos or copy for ads. A student who has learned how to distill a whole narrative into a few pages has the skills to write a strong college entrance exam. Creative writing skills are transferable to much of what they will need later in life.

Grow Comfortable with a Range of Expression

Creative writing allows students to play with words. Reluctant writers aren’t tied to academic language and get to experiment more without being told that they are often wrong in the way they express themselves. Eager writers can take their love of words further than would ever be proper in an academic writing setting. Vocabulary, style, and voice are all encouraged by this. 

Expand Soft Skills

Creating a strong and cohesive story that will engage readers and keep them reading requires planning, research and organization as well as good time-management skills. These are all the “soft skills” that academics and future employers are looking for. Outlines are still needed, and deadlines must be met. A class where students are planning, writing, reviewing, and revising their own imaginative work is a great blend of freedom and structure that translates into most jobs later in life. 

Encourage Reading for Pleasure

Creative writing classes improve the student’s appreciation of literature. Most students will have to take a certain number of literature classes throughout their academic careers, and understanding how poetry, novels, short stories, and plays are constructed and composed heightens their understanding and ability to interpret what they are reading. It just makes literature more fun!

Gain Confidence in Collaboration

Creative writing gives students more confidence in their writing skills. This class requires workshopping, where classmates read and critique each other’s work. By sharing their work on a consistent basis with others and receiving feedback on it, both praise and constructive criticism, writers come out of the class feeling much more comfortable and confident with others reading their work. Even good writers tend to be overly critical of their writing and shy away from sharing it. Creative Writing helps students get past that mindset and enjoy sharing what they’ve done with others. 

Prepare for Competitive Writing

Essay and writing competitions abound. Both academic and creative writing skills are useful in these types of competitions. While many of them require fact-based topics, the ability to capture an audience in the way a student talks about the topic is honed and refined in creative writing. These types of competitions look great on a college entrance essay and sometimes carry scholarship money. They are also another avenue for helping students become comfortable sharing their writing with others. 

Communicate Critical Thinking

Any writing class of any kind improves a student’s critical thinking skills. Whether it is academic or creative, writing is thinking. The ability to turn complex ideas into words that others can follow and understand, even enjoy, is one of the hallmarks of a good thinker and a necessary skill for both college and the work world.

Effective Academic Help

Helping not Hindering

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Teaching isn’t easy. Sequence ideas properly. Review material at appropriate frequency and intensity while not losing the student through too much repetition or to too little. Test for cognizance. Walk the student through application then see if they can work by themselves. Come back later to see how much sank in and to what level of competence. Repeat as necessary then do it all over again with the next level of mastery. Apply enough pressure to keep the student motivated but not frustrated but be able to bring the frustrated student back to the topic. Finally, invite the student to develop independence from you as educator so that you are no longer needed if you’ve done your job well.

Parent educators will often struggle more than a non-relative educator who has the benefit of a less emotional attachment and more experience with all sorts of academic challenges. The quality of a student's prior preparation, the hope of specific future success, and the intensity of current emotional well-being weigh heavily on the whole educational process for a parent and child. Add to this the fact that parents will experienced the full crescendo of emotions that can erupt when all these difficulties mix with a child's ability to push or pull a parent’s emotional well-being to the limit. Teaching is hard work for everyone.  

When you are tasked with helping your student through a tough academic topic assigned to them by another educator, here are five ways to help them rather than hinder them. 

1. Never Do their Work

A parent doing most of the writing, translating, or calculating to complete a student’s assignment circumvents all the emotional drama I’ve just mentioned. Consequently, a startling number of parents decide to "ensure" students’ success by doing most of the work for them. If you are writing your student’s essay for her, translating his Latin, or sorting out her logic problems, your student now has compounded issues. Having missed the chance to mature through earlier steps now guarantees the next ones will be far more difficult if not impossible. Worse, your student now believes that she was never capable of doing the easier work (after all, you had to do most of it for her) so why would she even attempt the more challenging tasks that come next? What a disaster. A lower grade and some weeping at the kitchen table (yours and theirs) is far better than doing your student’s work for them.

2. Mainly Listen

Think back on your own education. It can be exhausting and overwhelming. You still feel the same way from time to time even if you are normally fine with your coworkers, boss, or your daily tasks. Offer a snack and your ears. Listen to frustrations and concerns. Listen to them explain the assignment or essay prompt. Let them verbally process their worries about a busy project schedule. Talking it through often is enough to make a busy schedule more do-able.

3. Never Join the Gripe Fest

Listening to your student’s frustrations is one thing. Getting in on the gripe fest is another. Your child’s educators have limited abilities to motivate and move your student on to future success.  They have zero chance at doing so if you disparage your student’s educator. Have a talk with your child’s educator privately if you have a problem but never complain about a teacher to the student which effectively ends any positive impact the educator can ever hope to offer.

4. Supply the Time

Supplying your student what she needs for success need not be expensive. The thing students need most is sufficient time to accomplish the tasks set before them. I educated all three of my now adult children at home. I used to feel a little guilty about not adding more music lessons, sports, and events to their lives. As professionals and college grads today, they don’t talk about their extracurricular schedule. They talk about the time they had to explore things that were unique to themselves like playing their favorite instrument out of enjoyment, creating art out of inspiration, climbing a cliff as volunteer camp staff.  

5. Weather the Tears

Learning challenging things can be rough. Many of our brightest students shoot through a lot of topics and years before they ever meet their first truly difficult academic challenge. There may be more than a few tears the first time a lower than usual score comes their way or when they don’t easily grasp a new topic or when they didn’t do their best work. This is the time to model grit, fortitude, and stamina. Of all the things your student needs in life, grit, fortitude, and stamina through difficult times should be top of the list.