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.   

The Search for a Life Well Lived

Write Well, Speak Well, Think Well

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Completing a good education, we are told, must be the main goal for everyone under the age of 22. We can easily believe the lie that getting a good education is just a matter of ticking boxes, formatting a transcript, and getting into a “good” school at a price we are willing to pay. We look forward to college tours and narrowing down the list of possible majors in college only to repeat the process, albeit at more expense for four more years. Walking the college graduation stage means we’ve done it and “off we go” to obtain that career we’ve chosen or a seat in a graduate program where we repeat that check list a third time. Is this a good education? Will this give us a life well lived?

The opportunity to seek gainful employment after each level in this process passes the vaguely defined notion of a “good” education today. Soon, nobody cares if you made top scores in high school but watch for highest marks in college and then beyond. When is the goal reached? Eventually, most who have ostensibly obtained a good education wonder if life is more than earning institutional certification to continue to work hard.

Eventually we must all think about life as more than keeping a decent job with good prospects for promotion. This can cause a little confusion. The main impetus that occupied our first twenty-two or more years fades quickly as we “finish” our education. Is this it? Now what? We can presumably pay bills now but how do we go beyond that to have a good life? How do we discover the most direct path to that goal?

Defining a “good” life is the real riddle. It has been the subject of much philosophy and theology stretching as far back as we have written records. By comparison, choosing and then training for employment is easy. Keeping a job and becoming successful in that job is practically a no-brainer even though we use a quarter of our life on that one thing. Having and enjoying a good life is a profound mystery that few people solve to complete satisfaction having, in their view, run out of time before they “arrive” at that destination. Advice is mainly ignored by each new generation as though earlier ages didn’t quite work out the answers properly enough for their modern tastes.

A good life is subject to individual definition after decades of living with or rejecting different modes. Each person must evaluate where to place energy and passion. Some stay forever focused on the pursuit of good looks and good money. Others prefer slower investments that yield life-long relationships and a support system of friends and family. Others prefer intellectual challenges and are happy with a good library, garden, and book.

How Do We Live Life Well?

My deepest apologies for my inability to summarize a well-lived life in this short blog. I wish all of you many productive hours searching for this answer in trusted, wise, and virtuous sources as well as novel ideas (as each generation prefers). Instead, I suggest three basic skills that will help you the most in your search. They aren’t the absolute secret to a life well lived but they are the best tools to pack for that journey: learn how to write well, speak well, and think well.

Write Well

The main thing that prevents people from expertly expressing themselves in creative writing or formal academic writing is inexperience. Usually, they’ve been asked to play a complicated game but are never taught the rules. Some trendy pedagogical approaches today insist there are no rules! Write whatever comes to mind! You tell your truth! Such writers quickly discover there are rules to be followed and good examples to emulate if one hopes that other human beings will be interested in what they have to say.
Many students miss the most basic fact, namely that writing is meant to convey meaning to others so that they not only understand you but might even come to agree with you. How does this apply to a life well lived?

Long before there were pricey college degrees and peer reviewed journals, there was The Great Conversation, the exchange of ideas that has been going on for thousands of years that have to do with God, relationships, truth, knowledge, life, hope, despair, and how we must live. Every great thinker, writer, and doer of deeds not only consumes materials written on these topics but also takes part in the conversation about those subjects. Nothing is new under the sun. No fresh idea is truly fresh. Ideas have been in refinement for as long as people have written words and thought thoughts.
If you want to earn the highest academic accolades or learn how to fix small engines, being able to communicate in written form is a top tool for a life lived well.

Speak Well

The other day I was having a friendly conversation with a friend who runs a humble country greenhouse. He has never considered himself well educated since he set foot neither in college nor any formal classroom. He easily discusses thoughts on a wide variety of topics and speaks skillfully. He would be as comfortable in a boardroom, lecture hall, or a greenhouse full of tomato plants chatting with a customer. He enjoys the close support of family and community, and the competent success of all his efforts is easy to see. He is enjoying a life well lived! His ability to speak at ease with anyone and everyone on all subjects is as useful a tool in a greenhouse or at a campfire in the Rockies while he serves as a hunting guide. His clients range from adventurous millionaires to widows on a fixed income looking for garden advice.

Learning to confidently and boldly speak to others is a worthy tool for the job of building your own meaningful life. Just like there are rules and correct approaches to writing, verbal communication also has rules. The aim is to fully understand those rules and integrate them with such polish and practice that both tasks come quickly and easily to you. There are classes like rhetoric to help you learn how to overcome the fear of public speaking, attract interested listeners, and persuade them that you have clever ideas. The best success in speaking well is by doing more of it.

Think Well

Humans get so busy working on what they must think that they never master how to think skillfully. Expert use of one’s brain incorporates the ability to evaluate, study, memorize, and master new concepts without the need to have others teach that material to you or at least being judicious about the help you do need. People who know they can learn anything with a bit of perspiration and persistence, do. Not only are such people seldom bored, but the richness of their life compounds yearly, monthly, and daily. Their words are interesting to read or hear because they love to learn new things. They need no permission and seek few accolades, but their lives get richer daily. Those that can think well do so because they’ve given themselves the ability to learn new things, the humility to recalibrate when corrections must be made, and the confidence to employ their brains well, even without lofty credentials and costly degrees. 

“Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; refusing to set aside trivial preferences; neglecting development and refinement of the mind; attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

Writing Projects

Creating Your Own “Final Checklist”

By Randee Baty with The Lukeion Project

For many of the papers that I have my college students submit, I first require them to go through a “Final Checklist” quiz that they must complete before submitting their papers.  Quick reminders of common problems in the form of a checklist can help every student, and you can create one to use with your papers based on common mistakes or issues that you know you are prone to.  Here are the types of questions that are useful to have on your own final checklist.

1.      Have I read the assignment sheet one list time before submitting?

2.      Have I cited any information that I took from a source with both an in-text citation and a Works Cited citation? (Remember that citation always requires both!)

3.      Is my introduction interesting rather than bland and generic? (If you start a paper with, “In this day and age” or “Since the beginning of time” it’s time to rethink your intro!)

4.      Is my thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph?

5.      Does the conclusion show that I supported my thesis statement?  (This is actually a bigger problem than you might think.  I’ve had students submit papers that never addressed their thesis statement.)

6.      Does each paragraph have one clear idea that it addresses?

7.      Have I double-checked my formatting?  (Professors care more about formatting than most students realize!)

8.      Have I removed all unnecessary words, including unnecessary adjectives, adverbs, intensifiers, and modifiers?  Have I removed the word “very” from the paper?

9.      Have I removed all slang or casual language? (Cliches and platitudes also need to go!)

10.  Does my paper have the correct point of view? (If the assignment sheet asked you to write in 3^rd person but you have some 1^st person writing, you’re asking for trouble.)

11.  Have I done a thorough proofread?  (As I fully understand, many students don’t like to read back through their work once they consider it done.  Read back through it anyway.  A few minutes spent reading now could prevent having silly points taken off the grade for a small proofreading error.)

12.  Do I have the professor’s name spelled correctly in the heading?  (Yes, professors’ names get misspelled all the time. It’s not a good look for the student.)

Your own checklist may have different questions depending on the particular issues that you get caught on by your professors.  Don’t get point deductions for things you could have easily fixed!  After spending all the time and effort to write a strong paper, give it the best possible chance for a great score with your final checklist.

Learn the Rules and Tools for Good Academic Writing

Focus, Development, Organization, Sources, Technique, Editing

 By Randee Baty at The Lukeion Project

    “My teacher just doesn’t like my writing style!” I remember my daughter coming home from college with this complaint about her English professor.

    Most writing instructors and professors don’t care about style, at least not as students think about "writing style.” Those that evaluate student writing for a living have fairly objective criteria for judging a student’s work, whether it is creative, academic, or any other type of writing. Parents and students alike can learn to apply the same criteria to any writing project to see if something is objectively well-written or poorly written.

    Writing instructors, at least the kind most likely to help build strong student writing skills, typically use rubrics to grade writing. If they don’t use a rubric, they have some sort of checklist that keeps them focused on objectively analyzing student writing. Our rubric for research writing at The Lukeion Project has six criteria: focus, development, organization, use of sources, technique, and editing. These guideposts provide clear goals for students to meet without worrying whether the instructor “likes” their “style” or even agrees with their conclusions!

Focus

    The paper should relentlessly focus on the prompt given. For instance, if a student is asked to analyze Moby-Dick, they are not being asked for a biography of Herman Melville. That is extraneous information unless something in Moby-Dick specifically relates to the author’s life. Then the student would need to give enough information to relate those elements together, but not more. Analyze the prompt, know what you are being asked, and don’t stray away from the prompt as you devise your answer. If you do, the instructor will deduct points because of a lack of focus. Well-written papers are focused.

Development   

    Whatever point the writer wishes to make requires evidence or analytical reasoning to back it up. Unsupported statements or claims will not fly in academic writing. If a student says that Julius Caesar was an ambitious leader on his way to becoming a tyrant, he must provide plenty of evidence to support his conclusion. The student can’t, like Brutus and Cassius, simply make guesses about Caesar’s plans. Students should give examples of his behavior and use analysis of his behavior and accomplishments to make their point. Vague thoughts or feelings won’t work. It’s all about evidence and analysis. Whether or not the instructor agrees with conclusions does not matter in the paper’s grade as long as the writer has strong support and evidence to back up the argument. Well-written papers have evidence and analysis to support the author’s point.

Organization

    A good paper will have proper essay structure, paragraph structure, and reasonable progression through the argument being made. The essay needs to begin with an introduction that ends in a thesis statement. Well-developed body paragraphs must follow with relevant evidence. Evidence and analysis must relate back to the thesis statement without getting off track. The conclusion should tie all the evidence together and answer the “so what?” test (your readers should never wonder “so what?” after reading your work).

    Paragraphs should begin with a topic sentence, and everything in that paragraph must relate to that topic sentence. One point of the student’s argument must logically follow the previous point. If a student argues that settling Mars is too expensive for NASA to consider, she shouldn’t follow that conclusion by listing the benefits of settling Mars. Simply following logical thought-progressions will go a long way to improve a good analytical project. Check through the paper to ensure it progresses in an organized manner toward the conclusion. Well-written papers are organized and flow from one point to the next.

Excellent Sources

  Use sources appropriate to the paper. Always use them in a way that enhances the argument rather than hijacking it. Always cite the sources are appropriately. Appropriate sources offer credibility to the written project, but students struggle to understand what sources trustworthy and which ones are best left out. For example, some hobbyist’s blog or opinion piece won’t offer much credibility but a source written by a person with a proven academic track record as an expert in the topic will be best for a good academic assignment. Check the credentials of the writer so you are only using the best and most reliable expert sources. If you can’t tell who the author is or find out that author’s background in that subject area, don’t use that source! 

Works that are older than about 25 years should be used with caution on many academic topics to avoid using out-of-date information. Only use an older source if you can verify that that source is foundational and formative for an understanding of your subject matter. If you aren’t aware how much more we’ve come to know about most subjects over the last 25 years, you are the perfect candidate to avoid all older academic sources! In that span of time, we’ve gone from email being new and optional to vast libraries of data being accessible at every laptop in mere seconds after a few keystrokes. Most 16-year-old writers can’t appreciate what data-accessibility has done to change the shape of research in the last two decades. Parents, here’s where you get to entertain your student with stories about life before technology!   

Once you accumulate several reliable researchers in your subject matter, don’t let those sources replace the point that you want to make. Quoting extensively from a biography on J.R.R. Tolkien must never replace the argument you were supposed to be making on the influences of Finnish authors on The Lord of the Rings. Quotations or information from any source must enhance what the student has already observed from their reading of Tolkien. Don’t let one (or two or three) sources hijack a paper. An author must always do her own analysis. Too many quotations turn the paper into a wiki rather than an academic research paper and will show the instructor that you are more focused on hitting the word-count rather than examining and analyzing relevant information.  

Part of using sources well is mastering how to cite sources well. Citing your sources is a foundational principle in academic writing but it strikes fear in the heart of student and parent alike primarily due to a lack of experience with citation. The good news is this: methods for citing are set. Students should learn either MLA or APA formatting as early as possible during late middle school and high school. MLA is the most used formatting method in the humanities and by most colleges. Various resources are available to help students learn these methods but writing that doesn’t cite sources will be graded very harshly. Good writing uses sources must support rather than hijack an argument and all sources must be cited whether they are being quoted or employed to supply any relevant data.

Technique

There are several essential writing conventions that young authors must learn, master, and employ evermore. These are the basic rules of academic writing. These techniques are fairly different from casual writing (like this blog) or creative composition. Being aware of these academic writing laws show that the student writer comprehends the task well and is writing skillfully.  These are things that can be objectively graded because good writing uses the techniques expected when one scholar writes to another. Here are a few of the biggies on the list of academic writing laws:

• Always write in third person (he, she, it, they) with no first (I, we) or second person (you) ever appearing in any academic writing.
• Keep writing concise. Use no unnecessary words such as “very,” “interestingly,” “in conclusion,” “furthermore,” or “really.” In fact, simply eliminate 95% of your modifiers and intensifiers. They always clutter and conceal rather than enhance. You might arrive at your word count faster by including them, but your work will be judged more harshly.
• Remove all slang, cliches, or casual language. There’s plenty of room in casual and creative writing for these things. They don’t belong in academic writing.
• Keep the writing in an academic tone while you avoid sounding pompous or pretentious.
• Use the shortest word that fits the sentence rather than the longest word (use “use” rather than utilize “utilize.”). The reader should be able to read without stumbling over difficult constructions or long rambling sentences with too many clauses.

Proofreading

         Employ proper spelling, punctuation, and grammar always. Use proper formatting according to MLA, APA, or whatever format the instructor requires (and remember that everything in a paper is formatted). Edit your work several times before handing it off to somebody else to read. If you really want to catch all errors, have that person read your work out loud to you. No matter how many times you edit your work by reading it silently to yourself, an objective reader will always find areas that need work.

         As you can read, nothing here says anything about “style” per se. Grading for academic work is clear-cut and nothing is subjective or based on mood, whim, or personality. If you get a lower-than-preferred score, it is because one or more of these areas are lacking, not because the instructor dislikes your style. By focusing on these aspects, you’ll be able to objectively help your student--or help yourself--become a better writer.

 

Tell Yourself Valuable Things

You are What Your Team Says You Are

Amy Barr of The Lukeion Project

Does teamwork make the dream work? Often our team is our family. Occasionally we get to work with a group of our own choosing, such as with friends. Most often we are teamed up with others without much personal choice involved like when we volunteer to help to clean up after a big storm or when we join a league to play a sport, or we are part of band or dance group. Even if we live in isolation and can’t remember doing much of anything as part of a team, each of us still works as part of a very small team: we have to work with ourselves.

Some of us don’t have to imagine what it is like to have “that” teammate who constantly complains or interjects doubts.

“It’s too hot to do our best today!”

“We haven’t practiced this very long so now we are going to do a terrible job!”

“I’m not very good at this, I am probably going to mess this up terribly for everyone else.”

“The odds are really against us so why try?”

Ask any coach or director (of any kind) and they’ll likely tell you the most important part of their job is keeping a team’s spirit positive and productive. It only takes one person with a defeatist attitude to bring progress and success to a grinding halt. Employers avoid promoting grumblers and complainers even if those complaints are genuine. No matter what the task might be, productivity is destroyed by Wally Wet-blanket who pollutes everything with negativity.

“But I am only raising accurate concerns!” screams Wally (or Wanda) Wet-blanket who assumes he (or she) is the very first person on the team to realize that conditions are not ideal for swift and easy success. Most humans are naturally pessimists without assistance from negative teammates spelling things out. Statistically accurate complaints need not be expressed in most team situations (except in those horror movies where everyone weirdly agrees to hide in the basement instead of running toward the busy well-lit road nearby).

Good teammates defy reality! They cheer everyone else on to success despite the odds. They shout to struggling teammates, “you got this!” They celebrate each step toward victory with congratulations:
“Yes! That’s better than last week. Good work.” 

We hear these encouraging words and eventually come to believe what our teammates tell us. We become what they think we are. Maybe we really can do this!

Put two otherwise equal teams into a match and the one that shares a positive encouraging team approach will succeed over the group that wastes energy niggling about every obstacle and flaw.

The smallest team you play for is yourself and you maintain a constant dialog with yourself, even while you sleep. Maybe you say things like, “You aren’t very good at learning new things.” Perhaps you say, “You are not good at sports (or languages, writing, or math).” Sporadically you say, “everyone is much better at this than you are so you should give up.”

Hopefully you say, “Yes! That’s much better than last week!” or possibly, “You got this! Just another couple of practice sessions!” or maybe, “Sure, you are hot and tired, but you can finish well so don’t give up.”

A match between two otherwise equal teams will always be won by the team that cheers its members to victory. You face each day with a choice. Which team would you rather join? Wally Wet-blanket believes he is justified in spouting negativity about why it is unlikely he (his team) will do well, or he’ll mumble relentlessly about how unprepared he might be, or he’ll moan about issues outside his control. Since we are our own team, we become who we say we are. If we say we are not up to a task, we will not ever be up to that task.

Decide instead to tell yourself valuable things like, “I will give this situation my full energy and I’ll succeed better and better each time,” or “I practiced this so I know I can do it,” or “I really am capable at being good at this!” 

Let your internal dialog be the place where there never is heard a discouraging word.You are what you say you are. Start saying you are excellent.