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.