Doing Hard Things Helps You Do Other Hard Things

By Amy E. Barr at The Lukeion Project

You may have seen those shows in which a dangerously overweight and unhealthy person enjoys a total life transformation by changing unhealthy habits and adding vigorous exercise to their daily schedule. Producers love to show our “contestants” lumber and labor during their very first workout, barely skirting the edge of giving up on the whole project before it has barely begun. The star of the show starts by barely climbing a set of stairs or struggling across a beach with weights. Usually, that first work-out ends in tears and an affirmation that change is needed. Successful participants double efforts and dig-in for the long haul.

Very few of us do not need this sort of eye-opener in our lives. For many of us the issue really is weight or poor diet. For others, the struggle is personal and unique. Maybe our challenge is finishing a degree, educating a child, getting a promotion, buying a house, helping a sick loved on. Each of us must start our transformation by doing that first hard thing and deciding to double down and push through instead of quit.

As an educator, I deal with challenges of the mind first, but challenges of the body play a major role as well. My experiences of almost 20 years of teaching tell me that physical challenges are more easily overcome than mental barriers. I’ll explain a few examples.

My classes are synchronous and online, a format that facilitates a wide selection of people who struggle with what all of us would label as serious adversity: financial, physical, mental, even social. I have also had students who believe they are struggling through adversity in a form that most others would consider a “mild inconvenience,” if anything. To everyone, starting point barriers FEEL difficult to overcome. Our outlook is limited by experience. The first step (whatever it is) is always the most difficult!

Those who come to my class having experienced, survived, and overcome massive adversity (quadriplegia, professional careers at a very young age, house fires, loss of a parent, cancer, concussions, etc.) always (98% of the time) do very well in difficult subjects. Rather than assume that clever and determined people are cursed by extra challenges, look at it in reverse. Challenges make one clever and determined if one allows them to.

I am not suggesting you should go out looking for a major setback just so you will perform better in tough academic subjects. The mechanism in place here is simpler than that. To anyone who has already endured and successfully overcome that “first workout,” all other challenges diminish in difficulty day by day. Doing hard things helps you do other hard things.

As parents and educators, we must keep the bar high for this reason. Continually raise the challenge level rather than pave a smoother path. Each time one of us overcomes and perseveres, we feel strengthened to overcome even more. We can look and marvel at a person who has succeeded against all odds. We can stand amazed as they come down from the highest mountain or as they succeed despite so many obstacles. They have simply finished all their “first workouts” and are ready for the transformative success that comes through experience. Allow your challenges to build you into a person who can do hard things.

Why Academic Rigor is Still Important

By Amy E. Barr, The Lukeion Project

I teach tough high school level classes for a living. Sometimes it can be a little hard to market “academic rigor.” Students compete, tooth-and-claw, for a high GPA and winning transcripts. To them, It may feel a tad perilous to sign up for a class that challenges them so much that they may occasionally fail (or at least not perform perfectly). Students who are most keen to get into top schools become challenge-shy as they protect their scores. This is to their detriment. Rigor mainly boils down to the idea that a successful student develops academic grit during his or her strong determination to earn a real education.

There can be no rigor without the peril of failure. Why not make it easy and turn our classes into laid-back transcript padding? After all, some say, these are online classes. People could simply cheat their way into a nice grade. Out of many, here are our top 3 reasons you (and/or your student) still needs academic rigor:

Failure is the most important part of a good education

As parents, we may unintentionally prevent our children from mastering healthy recovery from failure by never letting them fail. With the best intentions, we may nurture our children so carefully that they don’t suffer any real academic setback prior to college. Not only will this damage their self-esteem either by having an artificially inflated one or by convincing them that they actually “need” all those second chances and do-overs and are unworthy of all the hoopla. Here come college and the first low grade or poor paper may be crushing and costly.

Second chances, no firm deadlines, and daily-do-overs may seem like a great way to teach a subject well—but be careful. Persistently protecting a child from failure will do very real damage. Shielding kids from failure will not develop confidence, self-esteem, or resilience. On the contrary! Confidence, self-esteem, and resilience result from a healthy response to, and recovery from, daily adversity. Here are three ways to help:

1. If you are a home educator, check your teaching habits. Do you always let your child retake the quiz, re-do the assignment, or push back the deadline? Start to firm up expectations and stick to stated consequences. A lovely side-effect of all this, of course, is improved time-management skills. 
2. Raise the bar: increase challenges, set expectations high, and then model healthy recovery when inevitable failures arise. Playing a musical instrument or reading a foreign language such as Latin and Greek are terrific at providing challenges, failure recovery, and pride over hard-won success.
3. Praise your child for being determined instead of smart. Enthusiastically celebrate the (real) hard work involved in more difficult tasks. A determined person understands that everything will come with more practice and more hard work. Success in college and life is 85% determination and 15% smarts. The latter can be fully compensated for if one has enough determination.

Brains Function like a Muscle and Most of us are Flabby at First

The human brain can memorize vast storehouses of information accurately. Most of us will never put this to the test because all early attempts “feel” difficult. Anyone who has successfully tasked him or herself with mastering (memorizing) a large body of details will confirm that memorization is always slow at first. We build our brains over time and use. 10 flashcards seem like an endless stack, at first. 

My son took a course on anatomy and physiology his freshman year of college. The course is used as a metric to weed out the uncommitted early on. He earned a very low B as one of the best grades in a class. By the end, half the enrollment dropped the course. Everyone who quit was also abandoning their chosen course of study (medicine of one form or another) because the task of memorization felt too tough. My son plans to retake the class this summer before his senior year to score (in his words) “a super easy A.” His brain has become far more muscular over just a few years of training. What was originally a very tough memorization chore is a piece of cake. This leads me to my final point.

Lack of Rigor Places Lifelong Roadblocks

Any person, regardless of income, health, house size, stature, gender, or status, can learn how to memorize and do hard things through determination and grit. Armed with these few basic skills (summed up as rigor), the possibility for personal growth and success are multiplied exponentially. Determination and memorization are learned responses to adversity and challenges. When my kids were little, I used to read Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. As the participants in the story encounter challenges, the repeated words say, “We can't go over it. We can't go under it. Oh no! We've got to go through it!”

Every year thousands of “top of the class” students arrive at college with too little determination and flabby brains. Dreams and aspirations are quickly crushed by those first failures. Even average (and below average) students who have been sharpened by rigor during their high school years will navigate these turbid waters easily enough to persist, endure, outlast, and succeed. Indeed, a good life is all about persistence never about perfection.

Why Academic Writing Can Feel Like a Foreign Language

And Three Key Ways to Help

By Randee Baty at The Lukeion Project

Every semester, professors assign academic research papers and then bang their heads on their desks as papers start rolling in that would be better suited to political stump speeches, newspaper op-ed pages, or the recruiting brochures of an advocacy group. Many high school writing programs have put such emphasis on “expressing yourself” or “letting your voice be heard” that academic writing has been pushed into the background. Unfortunately, when students get to college and begin writing any type of research paper, their “voice” is not what will matter to their professor. A well-researched and finely formatted analytical history paper, for example, on the assigned topic is the college goal. Mastering three specific skills can take a student a long way towards becoming the academic writer their college career will require.

For both high school and college writers, keeping their work in third-person is one of the most necessary and frustrating skills for students to conquer. Removing themselves from their writing can be a continual struggle. It will feel unnatural at first. Like it or not, this is the standard academic practice for one simple reason. If a student is writing a paper in Roman History, Shakespeare, or Philosophy, the paper is about Roman History, Shakespeare or Philosophy, not about the student.
Acquiring this skill is not as difficult as it might seem. Students may write, “I think Napoleon was defeated by lack of strategic planning.” What they need to write is, “Napoleon was defeated by a lack of strategic planning” or, even better, “Poor strategic planning defeated Napoleon.” A simple fix eliminates the first-person reference, makes the sentence stronger, and meets the standards for academic writing that professors will expect to see.

Students are tempted to write in first-person with, “We can see that Henry James was leaving the ending of his story open for interpretation.” They can improve it with third-person like this:
“Readers can see that Henry James was leaving the ending of his story open for interpretation.”
One of the most effective ways to remove all first- or second-person pronouns (I, me, we, us, my, mine, you, your) is to use the search function in your word processing program. Find each one and quickly correct the error. Did you notice how I slipped out of third-person in this paragraph? That’s perfectly fine because this is a blog. Your college professor will expect only third-person writing in a research project.

You may have heard that remaining strictly in third-person is a rule that is no longer set in stone and it won’t hurt for “I” or “you” to make an occasional appearance. That may be true in some limited instances for those in the upper levels of their degree programs.

For all the rest, assume that “I,” “we,” or “you” should never appear unless the instructor has specifically given permission to use these forms. Students must learn to play by the rules before they know how and when to break them. If a student has been continually encouraged to write about themselves, writing in third-person can feel like a foreign language.

Another stumbling block for some young academic writers is writing objectively. Academic writing is done to validate a position or present a logical argument. It is not meant to emotionally move the reader as a blog post, campaign speech, or fictional short story might. Objectivity is one of the keys. “Our planet” carries emotional overtones that “Earth” does not. For an academic assignment, the second one is correct and the first one will have the instructor rolling their eyes. This sentence, “In order to equal the playing field, we must look upon ourselves and evaluate the role we play in these social injustices,” showed up in a rough draft I was once grading. Aside from the obvious problems of being in first-person and using a cliché, it showed that the writer was not objective in their research. This made the academic honesty of the paper suspect. The sentence might work well in a persuasive speech or an op-ed for a publication but it has no place in an academic research paper. Learning to write objectively can feel like a foreign language to students who have been encouraged to focus primarily on their personal thoughts and feelings.

The third area of difficulty for budding academic writers is refraining from using sweeping adjectives and adverbs such as amazing, extraordinary, incredible, really, extremely, and, the one I personally hate the most, very. Using these types of words tells the instructor one of two things. First, the student author might not have had enough content and simply got busy adding words to reach the assigned word count. Second, the student author didn’t use a strong noun or verb. The intensifier was necessary to boost the “oomph factor” of a weak sentence. Either way, eliminating these words has several benefits. It makes your writing more concise. Anything that eliminates wordiness is to be applauded. It also forces the writer to think about the specific word (noun or verb) needed in this context. Instead of “ran quickly,” maybe you needed to say “raced.” Instead of “very pink,” maybe “cherry” or “coral.” All writers should write with vivid precision. Academic writers must work especially hard in this area.

Learning to avoid first- or second-person writing, learning to write objectively, and learning to avoid unnecessary adjectives and adverbs puts a student on the path to writing like an academic. Students may occasionally need the skills required for writing personal papers, but they will always need the skills of academic writing to succeed in college.