Be a 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.