6 Ways to Improve Executive Function

Plan, Monitor, and Execute Goals

By Amy Barr at The Lukeion Project

Not that long ago it became pedagogically fashionable to reject the old-timey learning methods that worked well for the last several thousand years. Big tech solutions, apps, and shiny expensive learning systems have replaced reading, writing, and formal reasoning. Now few conventionally schooled students ever read a whole book (excerpts only), are seldom expected to memorize much (apps are always available), and are trained for highly uninspiring multi-choice standardized exams like life depends on them. Likewise, educators are expected to provide an extensive infrastructure of detailed and colorfully prepped study aids to help serve up pre-digested information for easy student consumption.

Pedagogy was once an art. Learning was once a joy! Executive function, the cognitive processes and mental skills that help an individual plan, monitor, and successfully execute their goals, was both the method and result of a decent education. Plan, monitor, and execute goals? Educators are now being replaced by apps and students are being equipped for nothing much beyond a lifetime of playing with those apps.   

How can a student gain control of her own education and build his executive function? How can a student learn to plan, monitor, and successfully execute the goals of any academic mission now or in the future?

1.       Determine the exact parameters of assignments.

This is a fancy way of saying, “READ ALL THE DIRECTIONS.” Simply following the directions for an assignment will take most students most of the way to a terrific score. Roughly a third of students will not read the directions the instructor gave for an assignment. Another third will only read part of the instructions. The remaining third (academic superstars) took the time to carefully and conscientiously read ALL the instructions and do what was asked as asked.

2.       Start at the start not at the end.

Most of us claim we do our best work under the stress of a deadline because that’s the way we’ve always done things! If you are given a week to write an essay, develop a translation, complete a short speech, or read a book, when you start that task says a lot about your executive function. A lot of students who claim to struggle academically are just struggling with time management. Those who wait until 45 minutes before the deadline to get started will never perform as well as a person who put in more time, effort, and planning. Your potential is damaged by procrastination not by a lack of academic wits. The superstars are simply those who carefully and conscientiously plan their time and use it as planned.

3.       Set up boundaries and margins in your schedule.

Some students will set themselves apart academically by taking on every honors course and every AP class, plus every chance for extracurricular sports, dramas, dance, music, debate, and every competition their community opens. Woohoo! These students are living their best life right now! Except now these students have no margin for error and no down time. One bad week might mean things derail quickly. Some of these students are burned out before they start college. Adult life is a lot less stressful than being in school…said no one ever. Trying to do it all in high school and college is likely to leave you bitter, exhausted, and usually both. Instead of doing it all, try just doing most of what you want to do. Build in down time and margin for when your family needs you to help or when you need rest, recover, recuperation. Some of us are wired to GO-GO-GO! If this describes you, knock it down to just go-go while you also occasionally stop to smell the roses. Take it from a typical type-A personality: “I wish I had stayed much busier” is not something you’ll wistfully repeat about your youth.

4.       Do some every day.

The best way to memorize something, master a new topic, or finish a huge project is in small chunks scattered through your schedule. One of the big benefits of a homeschool education is that your life isn’t restricted to 60-minute class sessions and a 10 minute passing period. If you find you get easily distracted or bored, change out your task every 15-20 minutes. Use a timer and give yourself a small reward for staying on task that whole time. 20 well-spent minutes will allow you to get more done than 60 distracted minutes.

5.       Get some support.

If you have time management issues (procrastination or over-scheduling), if you get easily overwhelmed by the details of a project (oh no! research project!), or if you get easily intimidated by the material (you are a creative who has been tasked with a chemistry class), get support. Find somebody who will help you with accountability for getting things done on time or not signing up for too much. Clarify instructions if you aren’t sure what steps to follow next. Set up a friendly competition with a sibling or peer to prompt you to do a little better each time. Find different ways to understand new material through videos, songs, charts, tutorials. In other words, don’t just abandon hope and give up. Support, help, advice, accountability are all great coping mechanisms for whatever challenge comes your way.

6.       Offer yourself some grace.

Most of us want to be good at the tasks we are assigned. We want to feel competent, and we want to manage ourselves well. As much as we want all these things to happen for us daily, we are going to encounter challenges and failures. Traffic demolished the time we reserved for homework. A sibling got sick so the afternoon was spent at the doctor’s office instead of the library. You thought you understood the assignment, but you blew right past important details at the end. These things are all part of life. They are normal issues. When disaster strikes (and it will regularly) you have to offer grace to yourself. Grace may not improve this week’s poor scores but it will help you climb back on your feet for next week’s new set of tasks. Stand up, dust off, keep going.

3 Ultra Practical Life Skills

Grow Academic Skills While Becoming a Better Human

By Amy Barr at The Lukeion Project

I speak to a lot of home educators at conferences. Some families are very practical. They make life skills a big part of a child’s education. At the same time Billy is learning chemistry, he is applying that knowledge to cooking a delicious dinner. Other families tell me that their children aren’t expected to do many chores or family tasks while their student must focus on academics at all costs. Mastering certain mundane (non-academic) life skills is the best way to develop strong academic faculties while getting ready for life.

Learning how to follow directions, how to develop multi-stage projects, and how to focus on details form the three-part groundwork necessary to accomplish practically any goal in life. Here are my favorite three (very non-academic) ways to develop yourself academically while also increasing enjoyment in life.

Learn How to Cook

How well a cook can read and follow directions is the main difference between terrible horrible no-good chocolate chip cookies and the epic kind that cause the whole family to sing one’s praises. Sure, some people go through life happy dumping frozen nuggets out of the factory package but they’ll never beat grandma’s recipe.

When I was around 8 years old, I received a cookbook for my birthday. It was brightly illustrated, and it broke down instructions to manageable bits. I began to work my way through that cookbook. After a year or two of hard use I had prepared every recipe (even the ones calling for lime Jello). After enjoying initial success and after recovering from initial failures, I was willing to take on more difficult projects with more elaborate steps. When I was 11, I remember making an elaborate French dish with layered crepes, beautiful vegetables, and a creamy bechamel sauce. I prepared the dish from memory after watching Julia Child make it on one of her episodes. By the time I was 16, I was the head cook at a summer camp making meals for 100-200 people to earn money for college. Well before the days of heat-and-serve industrial food, everything I cooked was from scratch in a huge wood-burning stove. I did not have a cookbook there! Instead, I had learned how to follow instructions and follow the rules of cooking years earlier. It turns out that roast turkey and the side dishes for 5 people is not much different than preparing the same meal for 150 people aside from time and proportions.

Start easy! Follow a simple recipe that sounds tasty to you, master what it takes to multiply the recipe to increase proportions, and then challenge yourself to try more and more difficult projects. Learning how to follow recipes taught me the rules of food. Once I knew the rules, I rarely needed recipes anymore while I also learned the cooking steps that I could omit, ignore, break, or slightly alter without issue.

This is true for most things in life. Learn the rules of the game, follow them, and practice them well. Once you are comfortable with the skill set (cooking, martial arts, playing an instrument, building a model, crafting something, or writing a lengthy research paper), you can safely omit, ignore, break, or alter SOME parts of the instructions while you must carefully observe the important procedures that make the recipe or project work.

Learn to Grow Vegetables

Ever had a long school project that requires research, an outline, several rewrites, and lots of project management skills like patience, adaptability, and critical thinking? Many students are overwhelmed by the scope of such a long project. They often skip groundwork tasks (writing an outline or carefully evaluating resources and selecting knowledgeable research) but then try to jump right into the bulkiest part of the project without adequate preparation or planning. Science fair projects have been a staple of in education not because science teachers need another paper-mache volcano to clean up, but because students must learn how to plan, research, and develop long term projects.

There are a lot of ways to develop project management skills in life but the most practical way is to learn how to garden whatever you have a little spot in the sun, however big that spot might be. Sure, if all you have is part of a patio you’ll have different challenges than if you have a whole yard but everyone should start with a patio anyway!

Months of organic fresh veggies, plenty of sunshine, physical exercise, and brain-building mental challenges are already part of the paycheck for growing a vegetable garden. Successful growers learn essential project management skills plus how to problem solve. With a little tenacity (maybe a LOT of tenacity) you’ll figure out how to overcome challenges and work out how to harvest tasty rewards while building essential life skills.

Risk and cost management comes in as you balance planting times, frost dangers, heat, watering, and the expenses of growing from seeds or starts while squirrels, bugs, and deer threaten. The importance of research becomes clear as you solve the riddles of choosing cultivars that work in your area plus how to treat any pest or disease challenges.

Planning and forecasting the 4, 5, or 6 months you have for active growing, succession planting, and harvest echo what you might be tasked with in challenging academic program, college class, or career path. Leadership and good communication play a role when you need help weeding, crafting a new arbor, or establishing a new planting area.

Time management means you learn to attend to the garden’s needs while issues are still practicable. In the end you’ll not only have delicious things to eat (and share with neighbors and family) but also patience, adaptability, and critical thinking will develop as you combat your garden challenges and reap rewards.

Learn A Fiber Art or Two

Being able to focus on a single task is rare. Most of us have popcorn brains because we must multi-task constantly. We live cluttered chaotic lives in which we have phones, devices, texts, projects, entertainment, demands, obligations, people, appointments, classes, cats, assignments, dogs, and basic daily needs all competing for our attention. Our brains pop back and forth from emphasis to emphasis through the day. We’re lucky to spend 15 whole minutes concentrating fully on a single task without interruption so how could fiber art help this mess?  

Learning to knit, crochet, sew, stitch, weave, macrame, or even do leather work, etc., all impart the important life skill of paying attention to details in the most relaxed yet focused way possible. Work a little cross stich project. Finish a simple crocheted scarf in your favorite color. Figure out how to macrame a hanging for your favorite personal space. To accomplish even the smallest project means you must spend undivided time focusing on the details of something you will enjoy and appreciate afterwards.  

Start slow and build your skills. Focus and attention grow with practice. If you are knitting a cool little basketweave potholder, you can’t look at your phone every 3 minutes or you’ll drop a stitch! If you are counting cross stiches, you’ll have to gradually grow out of your popcorn brain habits or you’ll find yourself redoing your work three or four times. Ever try sewing a quilt? It is all about focus or you’ll wind up ripping out seams and starting over.

The best thing for our poor modern ADHD popcorn brains is gradual daily training in focus and details on things that are soothing and fulfilling to give us a nice payday for our efforts!

So, don’t omit these practical skills from life because they “interfere” with the demands of our academic development. Indeed, these things build and inform our abilities in the classroom and while making life a bit sweeter ever more.    

 

Why Study Philosophy?

Make an Investment in Clear Thinking and Logic

By Regan Barr, philosophy instructor with The LukeionProject

Plato has preserved a humorous anecdote about the “first” Greek philosopher, Thales of Miletus. As the story goes, Thales was walking along staring up at the sky and pondering the mysteries of the heavens. He was so oblivious to his immediate environment that he failed to notice a well in his path and fell in. A Thracian servant-girl was nearby to observe his misfortune, laugh at him, and spread the word abroad. Presumably, she also called for help to get him out.

The point of this short story was to poke fun at the Pre-Socratic philosophers, whom many Greeks stigmatized as being more interested in the stars and the heavens than in the path right in front of their feet. They believed that philosophy (the love, or pursuit, of wisdom) was both impractical and a waste of time. Some people today still believe that.

So is there any practical benefit to studying philosophy? I would argue there are many, but I’ll just mention three.

1. The study of philosophy helps develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.” This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, and while we have several similar quotes from him, there isn’t definitive evidence that he ever said or wrote it. Nevertheless, it’s certainly true. Humans are proud creatures, embarrassed and unwilling to accept that they’ve been duped. In fact, many people will continue to cling to a belief even when confronted with irrefutable evidence that these beliefs are based on falsehoods and mythology rather than fact.

Our society is experiencing a crisis in critical thinking. Students are often taught to believe and obey rather than to question, think, and evaluate. They are taught that “authority figures” should not be questioned, even if there is evidence that their statements are untrustworthy. Essentially, students are taught to place blind faith in these figures.

As students engage with the great thinkers of the past and of our own time, they sharpen their skills in research, logic, and evaluation. They come to understand the rules of logical argumentation and learn to identify errors in reasoning. By observing how philosophers have carried on a dialectic through the centuries, one arguing for one position and another responding with a counterargument, they can begin to identify and correct problems in their own thinking and in the arguments of others. The study of philosophy is one of the best antidotes to blind trust, and a catalyst for independent reasoning.

2. The study of philosophy helps develop logical and persuasive methods of communication

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.”  His message is clear: to change someone else’s mind, one must not only be correct, one must also be persuasive. The student who studies Plato’s Socratic dialogues will appreciate not only Socrates’ civility in the face of sometimes confrontational adversaries but also the way that he gently guides his debate partners to recognize their own inconsistencies in reasoning.

A group of ancient philosophers called the Sophists claimed that they could defend either side of an argument equally well. They were rightly criticized when they used their oratorical skills to convince people to believe untruths (“making the weaker argument seem stronger”), but their mastery of the art of persuasion is undeniable. Many ancient orators and statesmen, including the famous Athenian Pericles, sought out the Sophists to teach them how to move their audience to action. They were persuasive because they combined carefully crafted arguments with an understanding of their audience.

Today accusing someone of “sophistry” is an insult, but now more than ever, individuals must be prepared to defend their beliefs with persuasive arguments, AND to know when they are being manipulated by sophistry and demagoguery. In 2004, Desmond Tutu famously said, “Don’t raise your voice, improve your argument.” The ability to improve one’s argument and persuasively deliver a defense of one’s position, whether written or spoken, requires well-organized thoughts, clarity of expression, and an understanding of the audience. This is one of many important benefits of studying philosophy.

3. The study of philosophy moves one to consider the bigger, but oft-neglected, questions of life

Many students enter an ancient philosophy course expecting the ideas of the ancients to be somewhat unsophisticated. After all, hasn’t the human race progressed so far over the intervening centuries that the early philosophers will seem fairly simple-minded by comparison? Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is true that our understanding of our physical world has moved far beyond what the ancient philosophers could have even imagined. But some of the questions they grappled with remain unanswered. For example, how can we “know” anything? This is the question of epistemology. Can we be certain that our brains are interpreting stimuli correctly? In fact, how can we be sure that we’re not laying in a coma somewhere and everything around us is an illusion?

Then there is the question of ethics, to which Socrates turned our attention. Is there a difference between “good” and “evil”? If so, how do you defend your definition of “doing what is right”? Does the definition of bad or good behavior change depending on our circumstances? Do we have any obligations to our fellow-humans? To our planet? To other creatures with whom we share our world? And if so, from where do these obligations come? Are they based entirely on tradition, or is there some source we should consider authoritative in the realm of ethics?

Grappling with questions like this are not only mind-expanding, they are life-preparing. They move us past the mundane trivia that consumes much of our daily lives. When we are faced with difficult decisions about family, government, or health, on what principles will we make our decisions? If we have consistently lived our lives in accordance with a set of principles that we’ve chosen intentionally, perhaps the correct choice will be more apparent, even if it’s not the easiest one.

If you’re still reading, you know my answer to the question posed in the title of this blog, and I’ve only scratched the surface. Studying philosophy is an investment in clear thinking and logic, and it’s always worth it!