Getting Yourself to Do Hard Things

Motivation From Within

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project
 

Intrinsic motivation is the driving force of success. Intrinsic motivation helps us engage in a behavior because of the inherent satisfaction of the activity rather than the desire for a reward or specific outcome. It is the difference between working diligently to achieve a goal rather than working to achieve a paycheck, treat, bonus, or reward. Those last things are defined as extrinsic motivations.

Everything we do (or choose not to do) has effects on our life. Work earns money. Certain behaviors or beliefs might make our parents proud. Taking up weightlifting might make our appearances and abilities more to our liking. Finishing a long boring task will allow us to move on to the more interesting project.
Dr. Kou Murayama assigned a problem-solving task to two groups of participants. One group was told to master the material. The other group was tasked to outperform or “win higher scores” compared to their peers. Those told to win higher scores indeed did better on a pop quiz that day.  The group told to master the material performed better a week later. This second group’s goals were intrinsic, namely to fully “own” a body of knowledge for themselves. 

How do we convince ourselves to master a body of knowledge? How do we spark our own intrinsic motivation? 

Believe in your own ability to become intrinsically motivated.

This form of motivation is the strongest and most surefire way to keep going even when the going gets rough! Even on a neurological level, humans will stay on task longer if they believe they can complete the task for their own benefit. Intrinsic motivation works way better than treats, rewards, and paychecks.  It all starts with your personal belief that you can do a thing. This fact explains why small business owners are willing to work much harder (and longer) than employees. Intrinsic motivation pushes a person to dig deep.

Desire to be effective at what you plan to do.

It is so easy for some people to talk themselves out of everything good. Sometimes this behavior is modeled for us by others. Sometimes we’ve been through some life event that leads us to believe that it is better to hope for less and be surprised when there’s more. This can be a toxic habit, so it is worth trying to reprogram how you tackle life. Psychologist Tory Higgins, director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia Business school explains, “The essence of human motivation is that we want to be effective. It’s what makes us feel alive.”

Setting goals and feeling effective for accomplishing them is a huge win in life. Start by believing you can do a thing and then do it. The nice side effect is that we will quickly understand how we can influence our own life positively. We don’t need to wait until somebody else “gives us a chance,” assigns us a job, or pays us to do something. Visualize and desire successfully doing/learning/mastering then set the goal, form a plan, then do it. This is what gives us a charge and makes us know we are going places in life.  

Be around other motivated people, avoid unmotivated people.

It is impossible to stay motivated to learn a thing or do a thing if everyone around you is telling you it is “dumb” or unimportant or (worse) unattainable. If you can’t avoid unmotivated or unmotivating people, associate with those who have their own vision to achieve great things. Sometimes this means you should look for friendships or get involved in organizations or clubs with similar views. If that isn’t possible, encourage yourself by finding motivational success stories and seeking good advice for ways to stay on the path to success.  

Share your progress with somebody.

Persevering to accomplish a goal is something to be celebrated! Having an optimistic accountability partner can help you arrive at your goal and celebrate once you are there. This same accountability partner can help you in the bad weeks when you’ve had setbacks. This person will be there to remind you that setbacks are temporary, and that victory is close at hand. If you are in a class to learn a body of material, sometimes that accountability partner is your educator or your class peers. In many of our classes, we educators will celebrate wins, namely people who set lofty goals get a nice shout out when they arrive!

Set specific and challenging goals.

Accomplishing goals is motivating. When you set a lofty goal that will take time and effort, don’t just look at the finish line. Set specific measurable milestones to push you along on your journey. Each will be its own motivation. Each contributes towards your momentum. As a student mastering a subject, your milestones might be individual scores on assignments or maybe keeping grades within a high range for all exams, for example. Each task is a manageable step up the staircase. You won’t be ready for your final exam until the end. This week, excellence task-by-task is just the right size for success.

Train your brain by being your own accountability partner.

Our internal dialog is often a big detriment to success at what we want to accomplish. We might say things like, “I’m not good at this.” Maybe we’ll think, “None of this really matters.” Sometimes we look at a far-off goal and start to imagine all the things that might-possibly-could-potentially stop us from success. Every time you have these inward discussions with yourself, retrain your brain. Become your own encourager, or at least avoid being your own nay-sayer. You put nothing at risk by framing ideas of great success for yourself, especially if you have set goals.  There is nothing to be gained by being negative toward future you.

Rigid Flexibility?

Why One Hour a Week is Plenty

by Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Modern conventional middle or high school programs have trained many of us to think that students must meet five full days a week to obtain a “good” education. Few evaluate how ridiculous this assertion is so let’s count the cost. Students spend on average from 120 to 180 hours—per subject, per year—sitting at a desk as the standard normal way to acquire any single body of knowledge such as basic chemistry, history, Spanish, or geometry. Home educators are told by most states that their child needs 120 to 150 hours of "seat time" to count a course as a credit (that’s for an academic year of one subject). Many states require a minimum of 180 days of attendance in school. On the traditional schedule, courses meet for five days a week for fifty minutes. To make things more dismal, these hours are now rarely garnished by things like woodworking, auto repair, art, music, home-economics, or even good literature as books have been condensed to short stories. Such topics have been phased out in most places.

Cubicle Life?

Is there something scientific about these numbers and calculations about “seat time”? Have education scientists determined that the average student truly benefits from 120+ hours of sitting to master a topic? Not at all. Worse still, most classes demand additional hours at home to finish assigned work so let’s add another 80 hours over the course of a year. What can an average person learn and accomplish in 200 hours per year?
Those that believe there’s some logic behind requiring 120-200 hours per subject per year often demand even more. Disappointing results on standardized academic tests in public schools urge pleas for more funding, longer school days, more special programs, more special aids, plus lots more homework. Most districts comply and try to convince taxpayers that adding more to the school day is the only solution. Not only do modern students sit far longer in classes than at any time in history but conventionally schooled students rarely have time for part time jobs, serious hobbies, volunteer work, family life, or much else, for that matter. Long days parked in physical classrooms and long to-do lists notwithstanding, disappointing exam results persist and worsen while a generation of young people languish dangerously.

Old School

A century ago, around 11% of high school aged students attended any form of continuing education and they only did so for about half to a third of the year. A school day consisted of a few focused hours in the morning and a few more in the afternoon. Educators would normally set students to their tasks and then go elsewhere to work with younger students who needed more feedback on basic skills mastery. High school students enjoyed enough autonomy that they could work through material at a pace that they influenced while time demands allowed them to remain essential to their family (and local) economy with full or part-time work.
Most adults today couldn’t get close to passing the 8th grade exams of a century ago. 14-year-olds demonstrated better mastery of subjects and better intellectual engagement in a wide variety of topics compared to today’s PhD students. Great grandpa who “just” had an 8th grade education was likely far better read and better prepared in math, history, and science than most youth today. Great-grandpa and great-grandma would be stunned by how long 15–18-year-olds are expected to sit at a desk while they accrue no clear benefits nor make any contributions elsewhere when, for all human history before now, this same age group would have already been undertaking adult responsibilities at near adult skill levels.  
Veteran home educators know there’s no logical reason why anyone needs to sit in school for 8 hours daily and still have more classwork to do at night. If you don’t educate your students at home, put yourself in that classroom seat. Imagine how much better you might function if, after getting your assigned tasks done for your day, you could move to the next project to free up your Friday, read a book, play an instrument, paint, play a sport, make some cookies, work on a 4H project, or simply be done with responsibilities the minute you have finished your own work. Sure, you might be a procrastinator by nature, but it wouldn’t take you long to improve your time management and ambition level, all to your benefit, because your reward for doing so was relative freedom each day to finish up and move on.
Cubicle workers know it is difficult to find motivation to do much out of the ordinary when stuck at a desk no matter how productive they’ve been. At least they have a paycheck for their efforts but why apply a cubicle mentality to education and expect better results? Our 16-year-olds are being asked to imagine their hypothetical “paycheck” which won’t arrive until age 18 or 22 or even later.

Why We Picked ONE Hour Classes

We began offering semester courses at The Lukeion Project in 2006 starting with Latin. Our goal from the start was to teach the way we wish we had been taught. Because we weren’t government funded nor sanctioned (whatever that means), people asked us why we wouldn’t just make all classes fun and easy! Why should we have high expectations and assign things like papers or the National Greek Exam?
At The Lukeion Project we wanted to be as effective as possible at our jobs because our business model was built on students successfully moving up to the next level of difficulty over a stretch of years rather than taking just one fun class. Why even offer Latin 4 if we were going to do a poor job at Latin 1? The answer was not going to be found in duplicating methods that were failing in schools.
Our long-time teaching experiences at the university level and as home educators had already demonstrated to us how a certain rigid flexibility was the best model. The bulk of new material and a bit of review can easily be covered in a single one-hour meeting weekly. Doing more than 60 minutes in a session is difficult for even adults. All new material for the week is covered in 60 minutes. Students who need more time to master a subject are provided abundant resources to help demonstrate and review key concepts. Meanwhile students who are quick to grasp material can finish the work and move on. All work is turned in during windows of time with a set-in-stone schedule.
Rather than cutting corners (as those who are accustomed to the 150-hours-in-a-desk might think), we have found a highly effective approach that demonstrably brings students to their desired levels of mastery with sufficient autonomy as reward. This develops executive function, time management, and maturation.
If subject matter seems easy to a student during a certain week, she can finish quickly with free time as an incentive. If the material is more challenging, she can take all four days in the assignment window to complete the task while reviewing the recording, working a few self-tutorials, using flashcards, and playing the review games. Both types of students move along at the same pace, but resources are available to support extra coverage as needed. Staying on a schedule keeps a student motivated to keep focus and momentum. One’s “seat hours” might be 30 for the academic year (one-hour live online each week) but actual involvement in subject mastery –review, quizzes, writing projects, discussion boards, translations, etc.)—might be anywhere from 90 to 200 hours over an academic year, as the student needs. Since our first full semester course in 2006, this system has worked beautifully.    
Repetitive review tasks after a concept is fully mastered is drudgery and feels like trying to remain focused while staring at products on an assembly line. Students who need more time to learn a subject will not have all the same needs as everyone else. One concept might make sense quickly, but other skills need extra attention and time to sink in. This is why, for many people, conventional school can feel like running in the wrong foot race all the time. Students at all levels and approaches benefit when they are given more autonomy.
In a single one-hour live session at The Lukeion Project, we move ahead into new material and usually have students engage in that material or review in a lively way. The online classroom allows all students to participate, not just the fastest and smartest, because everyone has a chance to type in answers. Technology makes it possible to record each session so students can review whatever flew by too quickly. The one-hour meeting pushes the limit slightly on the extent of standard human focus, but we keep sessions lively and illustrated to help cover the material while engaging brains.
One student needs a couple of hours. Another one needs five or six. At the end of the week, everyone has had the chance to engage the material with the enticement of having control of one’s own time. Home educated students do very well in this system. Conventionally schooled students will struggle more at first because they are not accustomed to enjoying any benefit from finishing their work after achieving competence. Given the chance, they always prefer autonomy and liberty. They catch on quickly.
How do we know our methods are successful? We have both our Latin and Greek students take national exams, not for our sake but to demonstrate to others that they are making excellent progress in ways that are recognized by “the powers that be.” 95% to 97% of Lukeion language students earn honors. In AP Latin and AP Lit., students enjoy a 100% pass rate and 50% earn a score of 5. Many of our classes are taught on par with college level courses yet our students usually excel while still having time to accomplish the other tasks that make life worth living.

History Was not Boring

Your Teacher Was

Regan Barr with The Lukeion Project

Recently I was speaking to a friend who admitted she is still trying to overcome a lifelong hatred of history. She related a story that I have heard dozens of times: all her "formal" history education was nothing more than memorizing faceless lists of names and dates. She is still bitter. I had some awful history class experiences, as well.
For example, I remember taking state history in junior high...I do not remember any state history, I just remember TAKING state history. And I remember the room clearly. The powers-that-be called these things “portable classrooms,” but the students called them “trailers.” They were rectangular boxes made of corrugated metal that had been strategically placed at the farthest corner of a black-topped parking lot. The Oklahoma summer sun blazed down on that parking lot in late August heating it up to at least four hundred degrees. Crossing from the main building to the trailer for history was dangerous business. The furnace blast would hit you and you could feel your skin melting. Your only hope was to make it to the trailer before your blood began to boil. When we finally stumbled up the rickety wooden steps and into the air-conditioned coolness of that trailer, we collapsed into a dehydrated heap and gasped for air. As we paused to admire our own survival skills, it would hit us. “Oh, man!! They have done it to us again. They tricked us into coming to history.”
The state history teacher was young, just out of college, and he had flaming red hair. He was a wrestling coach who had been forced to teach state history. He must have done something awful in college because he was being punished in this assignment. History was as torturous for him as it was for us. He was easily flustered and when he became angry or frustrated, he turned bright red in the face. Some classmates decided that evoking this reaction from our uninspired and unmotivated instructor was a lot more interesting than any old boring state history. Those students smelled fear, and when their pack instincts kicked in, the poor man had no chance. He was like a wildebeest separated from the herd and the lions were intent on bringing him down. He would get louder, redder, and more animated the angrier they made him. To his credit, he never acted upon those thoughts of violence that surely filled his head. That class took years off his life.
Now some might be under the naïve impression that teachers should spend time learning the subject matter they will be teaching, but I think in teachers’ colleges today you get right to the crowd control training. It is a rare junior high that has an excited and knowledgeable state history teacher, so any poor fool who gets stuck in that classroom better have some crowd control training – some riot gear might help, too. No experienced teachers ever made that blistering journey across the blacktop to see how things were going out in the “state history trailer.” He was on his own!
That is the sum of my memories of history prior to college. I cannot even recall what gender my high school history teacher was, though I am certain I took some history in high school. Is it any surprise that I hated history? I remember my civics teacher because he had some funny mannerisms that were more interesting than civics. I remember my kindergarten teacher because she mispronounced my name for half the school year. I remember…or rather feared…my fourth-grade teacher because she was a large, gray-haired gal who thought her students’ idea of a fun time was skipping the lunchroom pizza crowd to eat vegetable soup (!) with her in the classroom. The image of her brandishing a yardstick as she attempted to chase down some miscreant on the playground is emblazoned in my memory.
I remember those teachers, but not the history I was supposed to learn. Why? Because of the interesting details. My teachers, classmates, and classrooms were swirling vortexes of interesting details, but history itself was not. Today I understand that it is the details that make history fascinating – the sort of details I remember about angry teachers or the walk through the inferno to the “state history trailer” – not the sorts of details you find on a timeline.
By the time it got to me, history had been scoured clean of all the interesting details and only drudgery was left. History does not occur in expansive decades, centuries, and millennia. It does not even happen in timeline tick marks. It happens the same way that life does: one moment at a time, one blistering step at a time. History is not the story of enormous hordes of faceless automatons. It is the story of unique people like you and me. They sometimes cooperate, sometimes get into fights, and sometimes act with dignity and reason, but quite often act in silly, dangerous, or unpredictable ways. It was not until I got to college that I had instructors who loved what they were teaching and filled their history lessons with little-known facts and engaging anecdotes. Guess what?? History is about real people! History cannot be boring unless life itself is boring. But sometimes we stand so far away that we cannot see any of the interesting bits.

Check out Lukeion Classical History for high school level and above