Full Effort is Not Full Credit but That’s OK

100%

By Amy Barr at The Lukeion Project

Recently one of our faculty was asked, “I’ll earn a 100% whenever I do my best, right?” What was the answer she gently offered in response? “No.” Isn’t doing one’s best good? Absolutely, working at full effort is important, but full effort does not always guarantee full credit. Let’s explore why this is the case in almost all skill acquisitions in life and why you must still put in full effort, no less.
Ever heard an inspiring story about how a person was able to lose a lot of weight to achieve a health or fitness goal or to recover from a serious illness or injury? While we often focus on the end results in which the hero enjoys success, we often do not focus on that person’s day-to-day effort. When overcoming any kind of challenge, successful people quickly come to understand that giving 100% is not the destination but the necessary—but mundane—means to achieve the desired goal. 
Consider a person recovering from a serious illness through weightlifting. She might certainly give 100% on the first day of training by lifting a tiny fraction of the weight that she will eventually lift after a year. Giving all she’s got to give will be lower and slower at first compared to last. A successful person marks goals and then works diligently towards goals with the mature understanding that victory will be enjoyed with full effort but only after many attempts, failures, and less-than-perfect days. 
If you can play a musical instrument well now, your lower-level goals (performances and recitals) started at very basic levels before they became more complex. Your earliest efforts resulted in a halting rendition of Twinkle Twinkle that only a mother could love. You must start there so that your mature talents are more impressive.
How does a fitness or musical goal compare to academic success? When learning an unfamiliar academic skill, you will be given sequential challenges to take you from introductions to more advanced levels. Of course, you should give each task 100% as you go but remember, you are new to this material. 100% effort for the first few challenges is like lifting those small beginner weights or playing Hot-Cross-Buns on your flute. Keep going. You aren’t there yet. You’ve got more to master.   
Your educator knows your goal is achieved not in simple lessons at the start but the subject mastery at the end after many lesser goals and lower levels are endured or conquered. Maybe you follow directions, format accurately, and edit well, yet your score is more mid-level than you’d prefer. You’ve worked diligently but you still have more to do as you develop your academic muscles. Keep working at 100%. You’ve only started and you have further to go.
Provided your educator understands the whole trajectory of the skills you are building, you are not just being evaluated item by item but skill by skill as you mature in the material. Unless the topic is assessed using answers that are either completely correct or completely incorrect such as studies in mathematics, expect your best efforts to be evaluated on where you sit on the trajectory of skill-building.
Learning to write well isn’t done with a single essay or even a single semester of work. You are given an essay to write, edit, and rewrite. You follow all instructions. You apply the writing tips you heard in class as well as features that you enjoy from other examples you’ve read. You put in the time, and you give 100% effort on this task. That score of 89 out of 100 can be disappointing unless you understand that you are credited for your diligence, your care with directions, how you edited, how you communicated, and also how you compare with your skills now with where your skills might be in three weeks, months, or years. You are still lifting tiny weights and playing simple songs. That’s OK!  You still have hard work to do. Keep going.   

Can't or Can?

Attitude Starts at Home

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Parents, I’ll keep this brief. All of you are busy. This week’s blog is all about modeling the attitude that helps propel a student through the most challenging academic trials. Since some of your children have not yet met many challenging academic trials, here’s your primer. The first month of academically challenging classes will be taxing but we have tips.

Survive the Drama – Everyone Hates New Challenges

It is your first week at a new job. You have a lot to learn, you don’t know anyone, you forgot your lunch, and you don’t know where to eat. As an adult, you struggle and stress tremendously when starting this new challenge, but you will likely wait until you get home to complain about getting lost while looking for the break-room and all the scheduled meetings. Sure, you are excited about new opportunities and certainly the gains in income, but starting new challenges is, well, yucky. This scenario is no different when you first start educating at home, only the lunchroom is sometimes easier to find. 

When your student starts a new academically challenging class there will be complaints. Everything is new, they want to do well but fear they won’t, and they don’t know all the answers nor understand all the expectations, they aren’t sure yet where to go. Yucky. We get it. For all of us, a good snack, hydration, and supportive words will help you and your student survive this dramatic start.

Praise the Effort, not the Smarts

Your student is putting in the time. All the signs are good because flash cards are in use, assignments are getting read, tasks are being completed. Praise all of this excellent activity because a growth mindset affirms that one can only get good at something after putting in some effort. You are fighting against the far more normal mindset of the undeveloped mind, namely that our talents are somehow already “fixed in place” (as in set in stone, stationary) at birth. Logic prescribes this isn’t so.

Don’t wait until that fabulous grade arrives on the first big exam to say, “well done.” The goal is steady consistent effort. Ever-improving grades are a nice bonus side-effect of putting in determination and struggle.

I like to use one of my son’s college experiences as an example. He’s now a gainfully employed physical therapist but his first class for his first semester of college was much the same as every other student who has grand plans for a medical career: anatomy and physiology. A&P lost half of the students before the drop deadline. Students who had luminous academic scores in high school were clawing towards scores in the low C range, the minimum to pass a course that is needed to move on in medicine. Another half of the remaining students didn’t pass and changed their majors. My son was pleased and proud to earn a low B (and retook it his senior year for an A).

An academically challenging course that was a career-do-or-die offered no chance for glamorous rewards but needed determination and grit. That score didn’t look particularly “smart” on paper, unless you too have been through this type of class. The work that really matters may not always look smart but sticking with it? That’s the prize!  

Don’t Foster an Addiction to Do-Overs

A trendy policy in public education right now is the habit of constantly allowing re-dos and retakes and do-overs and mulligans. In all the history of education, this was never normal, primarily because there is zero motivation for a student to study for anything. Enter that quiz and keep whittling away at a quiz score until boredom hits or you’ve toggled through all the multi-choice options and game the system. Consequently, we have millions of students who not only don’t need to study but now certainly can’t study if needed. Why would they?

This approach was introduced when personal devices became a major part of every classroom. Educators could put together a short multi-choice computer graded quiz online and leave it sit. Students can keep retaking the quiz until scores go up, the only goal (learning? Not so much).

The only type of quizzes that work for eternal re-dos are fairly basic by necessity. There isn’t time to grade, regrade, and re-re-grade complex assignments and projects with a room of 40 students. Material is kept at an artificially rudimentary level so it can be completely computer-graded. Now we have students who never learn to write under any type of pressure.

Offers of unlimited retakes give a student no pressure to surpass basic levels but why? If you must prepare a 20-minute well-researched speech to a group of esteemed peers, you prepare fervently. You never know what question the audience might ask! Nobody feels that level of concern over, say, an email in which you casually assemble your points and add important links then answer questions at leisure.

That stressful speech—just like a one-chance-only quiz, exam, or timed essay—pressures you to prepare. You want to present your case knowledgeably. Research, preparation, memorization, and practice naturally help. The reasonable response is subject mastery.    

Unlimited re-dos do not mimic real life. Mess up the quarterly report, your boss isn’t going to repeat the meeting. Tangle up holiday plans, you don’t get a second week of vacation to fix everything. Forget your college midterm, you don’t get to reschedule a week later after a second study period. Forget to pay the bills for two months? Good luck. 

Your Child Can Do This

Unless the faculty educating your student started teaching yesterday, he or she has had a lot of experience getting students from very limited experience in a particular subject to the point of proving very decent mastery. Constantly model confidence that your student can overcome, persevere, work hard, have determination, and ultimately succeed. Setbacks are expected! Occasional hurdles are required! Failure here and there? Normal! Failure is a teachable moment rather than shame but only if we allow natural heights of success and valleys of failure.

Set Things Up for Success

Provide tools, time, and encouragement. Subtract distractions. Avoid too heavy a load but don’t be afraid to challenge your clever and competent student. A greenhouse plant will quickly perish in the sun and wind unless you acclimate that rose. A common thing that sabotages success at the start of each new semester is the desire to get in “one last” break. Some students can manage the stress of hurrying through the first couple of weeks of classes for a trip. Most can’t. Set things up for success might mean keeping things boring until your student gets on their feet.    

Don’t Fill in for Them

Unlike faculty who might have your student for just one semester, our program hosts students often throughout both their middle school and high school years. This means that we can see how they did at the start and compare that work to what they are able to do four, five, or six years later. Unless you are a homeschool parent (and many of you are, so this is a big benefit to home education) there will never be an educator who has the opportunity to see a student start with, say, Latin 1 and finish with Latin 5. All of this is preface to the following absolutely true statement: no student whose parents “fill in for them” ever make it to Latin 5 …or even Latin 2.

It is out of love and concern that we parents are tempted to help by doing a bit of this assignment or that assignment as good examples of how to get the assignment done. It is often very difficult once you help a student in this way to stop because all the prior struggles were lightened and all the necessary coping techniques were never mastered. Never do any of your students’ work.

Make It Ok to Not Be Perfect

Perfectionists struggle more than any other type of student. This form of self-torture will make even the most capable and clever student miserable to the point that they often give up. When questioned, perfectionists will claim their approach is the preferred one! Why shouldn’t one strive to be perfect?!

The problem is that there’s no such thing as perfect here on earth. We are all but shadows of the real thing if ancient Greek philosophy is to be observed and we have all fallen short according to the Bible.

Perfectionists often give birth to other perfectionists. Your task may not just be to help your child navigate towards a healthier relationship with struggle and failure. The fight might start with yourself and how you model perfectionism at home. The next time you mess something up—if you are like me that will be before you go to bed tonight—do your best to model healthy recovery with a little humor and old-fashioned live-and-learn attitude.

 

Do it Anyway

Lessons from the Green Beans

By Dr. Susan Fisher with The Lukeion Project

This summer we had a bumper crop of green beans in the garden, and I decided it was finally time to put aside my fear of explosions and use my pressure canner for the first time. I won’t bore you with the humiliating details of my canner-side vigil, and the parting texts to friends whom I was sure I would never see again. The upshot is the beans came out fine and the house is still standing. A few weeks later when I canned my next batch, I was much calmer and that is where this blog post began – literally in a chair next to the pressure canner on the stove.

Just like most people, as I watched the pressure valve on my canner, I was thinking about Cato the Elder. Ok, that first part was a joke, but I really was thinking about Cato the Elder, an influential senator and historian of the early Republic, whose work and thought influenced statesmen and orators like Cicero and many others. He was also known as Cato the Censor for his strong opinions, particularly about self-reliance, hard work, and discipline.

While it is easy to dismiss Cato the Censor as a cranky old coot, with an overly starched toga who shook his noble fist while shouting at kids to get off his lawn, he does make some good points. First and foremost is the point that all of us, young or old, ancient or modern, cranky or not, tend to slack a bit when things get too easy. To be fair, we are animals after all and all animals lean toward slacking, since moderating energy expenditure is imperative for survival. Since this is a natural inclination, it falls to the vigilant like Cato the Elder to periodically remind people of the dangers of kicking back too much.

As the valve jiggled back and forth at ten pounds of pressure, I thought how easy it would have been to give in to my fear of learning pressure canning and just freeze the beans, pickle them, or not grow so many in the first place. Green beans are plentiful in Ohio, after all, and it is much easier just to get them at the store. However, this is just the sort of danger against which Cato was warning. Had I given in to my fear of the pressure canner, I would not have learned a new skill, nor would I have some nice quarts of green beans for this winter. 

Feeling smug that I hadn’t gone the easy route where the green beans were concerned, I started thinking about other areas in which, by Cato’s reckoning, I might have slid into slackerdom and was thereby missing out. This mental inventory led me to three pertinent questions for myself and others for determining whether one is taking the easy route to their own detriment:

• When is the last time you tried something new?

• When is the last time you tried something scary? (I’m not talking about alligator wrestling here, although if that’s your thing, then more power to you. I’m talking about things that people do regularly that you have psyched yourself out about.)

• When is the last time you told yourself you were incapable of doing something?

If you answered “a long time ago” or “I can’t remember the last time I tried something new” for questions one and two and/or “yesterday” for question three, odds are that you have given in to fear, laziness, or inertia and are on the road to becoming soft. (I can hear that overly starched toga rustling from here.)

Luckily you don’t need a crusty old coot of a Roman to point his bony finger in your face to get you back on the straight and narrow. Three words will do the trick. Grab a pen and write these down: Do it anyway.

• This is new – I don’t know how to do it! Do it anyway.
• I know that this is safe, but I’m scared. Do it anyway.
• There are so many sentences here to translate. Do it anyway.
• I might make a mistake. Do it anyway.
• It would be easier to get my answers off the internet. Do it anyway.
• I left this assignment until the last minute, and I’ll never finish in time. Do it anyway.

“Do it anyway” is the key to shutting down all the excuses that allow you to cop out, give up, or take the easy way out. More importantly, these three words are also the key to guaranteeing success, new skills, and growth. Do it once and you might have some quarts of green beans. Keep at it and you’ll have character, of the sort that would make Cato the Elder very pleased indeed.