Risk is Part of Life

Give it the Old College Try

Amy E. Barr, The Lukeion Project

According to Grammarist, “give it the old college try,” an idiom that means “to put forth one’s very best effort to achieve something with a high risk of failure,” came not from colleges but from baseball. The old saying was framed around the notorious enthusiasm of an amateur athlete playing for his college team. The passion of a young energetic person attempting to impress his coach and peers might compel a player to catch an impossible fly ball or to risk his good looks by sliding face forward for a home-run.  

Which risks seem worth “the old college try” to you? Maybe you are so risk-adverse that you plan to stay in your basement to safely hide from life’s troubles. Perhaps you enjoy taking risks. You might consider parkour, exotic pets, adventurous foods, and walking a slack-line across vast chasms as worthwhile activities. Good for you! Take pictures for the rest of us.

Risk is unavoidable. Much of it can be the spice of life. Some of it is not so spicy. Most of us are middle-of-the-road when it comes to both risk-taking and our level of enthusiasm for those risks. The average human maintains comfort zones carefully but will occasionally venture outside of favored boundaries to attempt something new, difficult, or even risky (especially to impress).

If you’ve ever been accused of over-thinking, this means you spend quality brain energy vacillating and oscillating between the virtues of remaining in your comfort zone vs taking on challenges. Over-thinking things is what humans have done for centuries. Who or what decides the outcome of ventures tempted?

In Virgil’s Aeneid, Trojan refugees are led by rex Aeneas. They are driven by fate to undertake harrowing trials. The first half of the Aeneid follows Aeneas as he tries to get home to his new territory in Italy. Virgil made his chief character as a Roman parallel to Greek Homer’s Odysseus. Unlike swashbuckling Odysseus, Aeneas piloted past monsters, shipwrecks, and even the underworld to fulfill his patriotic duty to secure the safety of his fellow Trojans and then found the Roman race. Virgil weaves the Fata, the Fates, into his heroic account because despite risks and massive effort, Aeneas and his people will not fail. Aeneas’ success was set in stone by The Fates and by a poet retelling the tale 1000 years later.

Cicero said in his partly surviving work On Fate, “What I want to know therefore is … if there were no such word at all as fate, no such thing, no such force, and if either most things or all things took place by mere casual accident, would the course of events be different from what it is now? What is the point then of harping on fate, when everything can be explained by reference to nature and fortune without bringing fate in?”

Estimating probabilities of success and failure did not really get going until 1494 when Luca Pacioli, a monk in the Franciscan order, posed a puzzle that laid the foundations for modern risk calculation when inn 1654 the Pacioli Puzzle was finally solved. Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat had to get involved. Around this same time an Italian doctor, Girolamo Cardano, estimated the likelihood of different outcomes of rolling dice. Galileo would come to the same conclusions that Cardano did but didn’t make a fuss because he had his hands full with galaxies at the time.

For most human historical record, people viewed risk as something dictated either by fate or divine providence. Even Aeneas feared the fierce interference of an angry goddess intent on drowning what little remained of the Trojan nation, despite the dictates of The Fates (of whom there were three). The will of the Roman gods were not quite as powerful as destiny but often the lines were blurred for we poor mortals.  

What would you risk doing if you knew you could not fail? What if you believed that success—at whatever challenge is ahead—is something that fate has preordained? You would also have to acquiesce to the reverse: failure—at whatever challenge is ahead—is equally dictated by fate. This was the primary outlook of most ancient civilizations. Cicero (On Fate) detailed the problems we would face if we truly believed everything that happens is purely thanks to fate. He forecasts for such a person “the entire abolition of action from life.”

While Cicero continues to grapple with ideas of fate, providence, causation, and free-will, his worst forecast is for those who truly believe that fate is set: “If it is fated for you to recover from this illness, you will recover whether you call in a doctor or do not; similarly, if it is fated for you not to recover from this illness, you will not recover whether you call in a doctor or do not; and either your recovery or your non-recovery is fated; therefore there is no point in calling in a doctor.”

Aside from insurance companies and investment firms who now know how apply their best mathematical calculations to spread-sheets and apps to determine risks and possibilities in the form of fractions of standard deviations, most people still do their own personal calculations about how often they are ready to go all-in on something that seems risky, dangerous, or just labor intensive.

We modern souls are no further along than Cicero as he tries to calculate the role of fate, free-will, divine interference, or (as he says) “the unexplained swerve of atoms” as we navigate life, choose when and where to work, when to rest, and in figuring out what is “meant” to happen to us. Freewill resides in our own not knowing, either way. We wouldn’t want to see our fate nor that of our loved ones. We simply couldn’t bear the knowledge of our own destiny. So, the only logical alternative is to press on with all things as though we cannot and must not fail.

Cicero. De Fato. Trans. R. Rackham

Take Notes

Supercharge Your Learning & Save Time

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Your class is an hour long. In that class your instructor is going to cover some important concepts. You should know they are important because time is very limited, and most educators are going to prioritize material you must know! Less important details can be gleaned from assigned readings but, rest assured, what’s covered in class is the top stuff to learn. The most important material is being served to you on a shiny platter with stars and exclamation points to let you know that these are the foundational things to understand. Many recognize class time (any class time) for this value while many more do not.  

You have choices about how to use the scheduled class or lecture time ahead of you. You could listen with half an ear while you fiddle with a distraction (social media, pet capybara, a game app, etc.); you could listen attentively but passively (notice that passive listening almost always leads to fiddling with a distraction); or you can actively listen by taking notes.

Only one of these approaches makes good use of your class session for which you have already made time in your schedule. The other two are a waste of time. Not only do you miss your first and best opportunity for learning the most essential concepts of any particular subject, you now have to find time in your schedule in which you must be your own tutor by trying to figure out what is important and why they need to know it. This “I’ll eventually figure it out” approach is common, but it is a massive waste of time.  

Many argue that they don’t need to focus carefully on in-class material if it is also covered in the textbook or in assigned readings. By this reasoning, why not save time and money by abandoning every formal academic scenario and becoming entirely self-educated? It is true that some subjects lend themselves to self-teaching. Others do not. If you want a good return on your time investment, your educator will prioritize the most important material and then explore a variety of ways to help you best understand that material in context.

Many argue that they plan to listen in class but don’t feel they want to take notes because they aren’t very fast at taking notes or maybe their handwriting isn’t very tidy. This is like saying you are going to wait to learn essential skills until after you’ve been added to the Olympic team in that skill. You don’t start on the first day with good reflexes and strong muscles in a sport. You won’t start note-taking on day one with neat, speedy, and organized words. You only get faster and more efficient at taking notes by taking notes. Sloppy handwriting is not a problem. If you are taking notes properly you can be certain that your writing is sloppy because you are keeping pace with the material and you know this isn’t the final set of notes on the material.

Taking notes in class is the fastest way to understand material and then internalize what you are hearing because you are forcing yourself to hear, process, consider, think, and organize the words necessary to summarize what you are seeing and hearing in class. Taking notes by hand forces full brain engagement in the material being presented. This also works when you are reading an assigned texts, especially if you are summarizing what you have read into your needs or formulating more abbreviated definitions of terms and concepts. You must formulate a full thought and express it in such a way that makes sense to you and then write it out. There’s a Latin phrase that holds true in this discussion: to teach is to learn. When you take notes, you are teaching yourself and learning well.  

Taking notes by hand is also the best way to stay attuned to the material presented. We are all prone to losing focus when any distraction pops up. Maybe your cat walks in and begs for treats reminding you to move your stuff out of the cat’s favorite spot but now he wants a treat and look at how his water bowl is empty and let’s get him to play with his new toy and then…wait, what did the teacher just say about this week’s quiz? Making a habit of notetaking means our hands are full, our eyes are on task, and our brains are meaningfully engaged even if we might still have the cat in the room who plans to take a nap in his favorite spot even if you don’t move your stuff.

What’s the best way to learn by taking notes?

1. Don’t prioritize material as note-worthy or not until after you’ve finished the class. Just take notes anyway. Evaluations can come later. For now, stay attuned to what is being said by jotting notes down non-stop. During a lecture, staying focused is half the battle.
   
2. Don’t try to copy anything verbatim unless your lecturer makes it very clear that verbatim is important. Instead, listen for keywords, terms/definitions, proper nouns, specific ways of explaining tricky topics. If you have a good educator, he or she will repeat important things a couple of different ways so get down a few anchor notes and then flesh things out a bit more as your understanding expands. Leaving extra line spaces and wide margins will help you add things back in later if you hear it explained in more than one way.
3. Notes need not be limited to words! Include arrows, asterisks, underlines, colors, doodles, or whatever system you like to use to indicate priority or process. Some take notes like a rough loose flowchart while others take notes more formally with traditional outline techniques. Both do the job.
4. Always recopy your notes after class meets or the lecture ends. Keep a loose-leaf binder with a stack of lined paper for taking notes during class and a separate notebook or binder for recopying them later. Why recopy? You will forget 50% of what you heard in class within 24 hours. If you recopy your notes but flesh them out by writing more complete sentences or with added material from your readings or charts from the textbook with formatting or colors for important terms, you will have more than half-finished your studying for any quiz or exam that comes your way. You will have engaged your brain to listen and write and then analyze and write once again while the thoughts are still fresh. If you recopy notes soon after the lecture, you’ll accomplish this step very quickly. If you wait, you’ll have to spend more time remembering. Your choice.
5. Even if you borrow somebody’s notes to prepare for an exam, it is essential that you recopy them for yourself. Writing things out allows our brains time to process and absorb new information easily.  
6. If you struggle to increase speed when taking notes, consider acquiring the skill of writing in cursive, a writing style that was designed to add speed to writing by hand. Printing is the slowest way to write anything. 
   

Taking notes is an intense study method that will accommodate full mastery of nearly anything you hear or read. It is something that almost anyone can do and at any age. It is a suitable complement to any preferred learning style. Focused note-taking requires no additional class time. Compared to somebody who chooses distracted unengaged learning, you’ll spend much less total time recopying notes in preparation for any quiz or exam. Fail to take/recopy notes and you’ll spend much more time trying to teach yourself the material from scratch without the benefit or prioritized information.

Join forces with your skilled educator by taking notes. Your grades and subject mastery will greatly improve even as you spend less time working on the material at hand.

One Size Fits Few

Try Home Education À La Carte

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

If you are new to home education: Welcome! If you are thinking about it but haven’t committed to the process, maybe this piece will help. We will discuss whether a comprehensive home school curriculum is right for your family or if à la carte is the better option. As a savvy reader, you might already suspect where my opinions lean so here I’ll offer some observations from the standpoint of a quarter century teaching my own kids plus a few more on top of that teaching everyone else’s kids as well. 

If you’ve never been to a major home education conference, add one to your schedule this coming spring or summer. Assume you’ll be overwhelmed by the flood of home education information and prepare to pace yourself. Attending all days of the conference will give you time to collect information, browse, attend sessions, and browse the vendor hall several times more. When we attend as vendors for The Lukeion Project, we regularly have new home educators stop by our booth. We can tell they are new to the process because they look a little shell-shocked. Most have no idea there are so many options available for educational help. 

Home school vendors can be like any other salespersons. They sometimes create a need and then offer to fill it for you. With new home educators looking for so many answers at once, they’ll suggest that it is preferable to buy into a system that is a one-size-fits-all curriculum to solve all education concerns for every child throughout his 12+ years of study. This notion is, of course, ridiculous if you’ve ever met any actual children. I only had three to educate and they couldn’t be more different. Being able to customize what they learned and when they learned it was the most important virtue in their home school experience.  
A one-size-fits-all education is a major drawback of an institutional education. Only the slenderest slice of pie on the pie chart of educational styles will claim robust triumph in an institution. A far larger part of the pie chart represents students that merely learned how to function in such a system. These usually graduate with only a few bright moments of inspiration and insight aside from that rare class and maybe a senior trip. An equally large slice on that chart represents students who languished entirely. There’s a good chance that even our best and brightest could have been even better and brighter in an educational system that allowed for customization. 

12-years of education-in-a-box is not going to inspire anyone, yet the most lucrative educational companies out there are the glitzy programs that sell a full year’s grade level in a complete package, usually with claims that their approach is both super convenient for parents and a delight to all children, regardless of their age or interests.  If you look closely, you’ll see that these programs especially target families with younger kids because families that continue to home school through middle/high school will certainly move to a more à la care approach or give up. 

Why do they target new-to-home-school families? These comprehensive year-in-a-box style curriculum approaches are like gummy multivitamins for kids. They are advertised as a product that has everything a body needs but you will mostly pay for pretty colors and nice packaging to help convince your child to swallow it. They will try to convince parents that such programs are “the only way to be sure” that their child gets everything she needs. Moms are easy prey to this approach. Natural insecurities are targeted by big box curricula vendors who suggest that there’s one right way to educate and one acceptable body of knowledge a child must master if he will be able to move forward and succeed in life. Big box curricula companies prey on our fears that we are not up to the task of educating our own children.

If you wander a vendor hall at any major home school conference, you’ll see more and more products that are marketed to busy parents who don’t have time to prepare. This is a safe marketing approach because I have yet to meet a modern parent who finds enough time in the day to finish all that must be done. I have even seen literature curricula advertised as requiring zero parental knowledge of every reading any literature. Plug-and-play curriculum is becoming more common because, again, there are lots of insecurities among educators worried their child is missing something. 

You are still an excellent candidate for an à la carte approach, even if you aren’t the one who teaches every minute of your child’s education. If your child is set on mastering an entirely foreign-to-you subject, then an approach that requires minimal parent preparation is probably a good idea. I would hate to think what would have happened to my children’s various passions had it been entirely up to me to prepare and teach them rock-climbing, piano, French, blacksmithing, and chemistry. 

Busy or not, all of us must read to our kids, gently teach them essential life skills, manners, basic art skills, writing, music basics, money management, and math, all while conveying our own worthwhile passions (gardening, cooking, golfing, sports, dancing, etc.). Why out-source the next level? Many newbies are led to believe there is some scientifically devised body of knowledge that stands above these basics in the elementary years. They assume that this fictional “scientifically devised body of knowledge” is expertly instructed in a formal institution and that some scientifically approved group of officials have pronounced their blessings on such curriculum and stamped it with accreditation, a word that sounds more substantial and important than it is prior to one’s college years.

À La Carte Education

Most first timers who buy year-in-a-box approaches will start their school year with enthusiasm. They have colorful textbooks, a stack of workbooks, some art supplies plus a few clever math manipulatives. They are ready to go. If I had ever tried big-box-curriculum, my kids would have gotten started with the subjects they like first. By the end of the first week, my math-loving son would have already finished most of his math for the first semester. He’d have tucked anything requiring creative writing under his already tattered pile of workbooks. My oldest would have finished a full year’s collection of creative assignments and would be regarding her math book with fear and loathing hoping it would disappear. My youngest would have abandoned all of it and would be working through his latest piece on the piano. He might have graduated from college with honors, but you couldn’t tell he’d turn out that way as a youth. He was allergic to anything that gave even a whiff of being overly simplified for child-consumption. He only wanted to work with materials of substance and weight. 

Creating a customized approach to all major subjects one at a time, a child at a time, is the à la carte educational approach that I recommend. This might mean that the math approach I’d picked for my son’s 9th grade year might only serve him for the first 2 months and then he’d be ready for the next thing (and I’d have to find an entirely different approach for my two creatives). My oldest would be given time in the day to draw, paint, and be artistic requiring little more than access to good music and art supplies. My youngest needed to blow off steam by playing on the piano whenever he needed to work on subjects he didn’t enjoy (I’m looking at you, math) but he might spend a couple of days “wasting” time reading ancient philosophy or figuring out how to tie knots in survival scenarios.

“But how do you know they are learning everything they need to know?” you might ask.

Rest assured that any reasonably conscientious home school educator is doing an equal or (usually) superior job compared to any standard curriculum approach in an institution (yes, even the really expensive ones). But if you are doing it right, you are not educating alone in a vacuum on a desert island. Others should be brought alongside the educational process to help flesh out a completely customized experience for your totally unique learner. The most important person to come alongside you in educating your child will be your child himself.

Many colleges prefer home educated students today because they have read real literature, learned to write in both creative and academic contexts, and they tend to be autodidacts because they learn how to learn. As a full-time educator of a variety of different types of students (public, private, home-schooled, unschooled), we find that students who have been conventionally schooled (either public or private) seriously struggle in scenarios that require them to take ownership over academic material. We have to walk them through managing even basic elements of maintaining their own learning experience. Even conventionally schooled gifted students struggle in this area because in most conventional programs (small or large, prestigious, or mundane), education is something that is done to you rather than something that you own and do for yourself and do on your own behalf.

Students who take ownership in their own education learn they can speed or slow their pace on subjects based on the intensity and quality of their efforts. They discover they can seek out and successfully take on more difficult subjects in areas that they enjoy because they’ll do what they must to move forward and achieve their own goals. They learn that it is better to go back and re-learn the basics in areas that are important to their own academic plans rather than check a box that a subject is done. If their goals are less academic and more hands-on, owning their own education means they’ll start real work in areas they love sooner, not later. Metalworking, music, drama, woodworking, cooking, working with animals? All of this can start much earlier in a child’s life when mom or dad have allowed --and even designed—all of that to be part of their child’s education.  
   

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

Sing, Dance, Grow, Talk

A Note to Home Educating Parents

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

As my youngest child prepares for his college graduation in a couple of weeks, I look back at the sum of our family activities, chores, achievements, and low points over the last 28 years since my first child was born. We celebrate that all three of my home-educated children finished their college degrees even as my middle child completes his graduate medical degree for yet another year. (That’s not a humble brag but a full-on boast, for those keeping score). All three of my adult children are hardworking, successful, lovely people that we enjoy being around every chance we can find.

I present here some things I’ve learned. Take the ones you like. Discard the rest. Find what resonates. What would I have done differently and how I could have improved matters under my control as a home educator and mom? What would I recommend to families who are still in the educational trenches?

As a professional educator, some of you might assume I will suggest families up their academic game for their offspring. Maybe more AP courses and more CLEP exams? Maybe harder classes and higher grades? Perhaps some academic summer camps mixed with year-round academics? On the contrary!

Approaches that worked for my family:

1. Provide a rich buffet of opportunities and tools in topics that interest your student (Let your musicians have instruments. Let your artists have art supplies. Let your problem solvers play games.)
2. Settle for a checkmark of completion in topics that don’t.
3. Make travel a big part of your family’s experience to expand the assortment of things that interest your student.
4. Let your child’s personal enthusiasm guide your budget of academic energies. Get requirements quickly finished and then lavish energy on topics that bring excitement.
5. If you conscientiously educate at home, be assured your child will exceed expectations at college.
6. If you foster time management skills, personal responsibility, plus the confidence to both endure and overcome challenges, your student will greatly surpass his peers at college.
7. Don’t overdue AP classes, CLEP, and dual enrollment opportunities. There’s no replacement for the friends and connections your child will make at college if they do so from the start. Too many frugal moves to skip the first few years of college will result in a failure to make social connections and then a failure to form essential professional ties with peers and professors. These connections are as important (if not more important) than the expensive diploma at the end.
8. Thinking, writing, reading, and understanding are topics taught best at the dinner table, garden, library, and barn rather than through a formal curriculum or workbook. Just talk to each other as adults, even if your adult is only 10 or 13… then see point number 4 when it comes to spending time or energy on classes.
9. Let each of your children become an expert in areas she loves and then trust her advice or let him guide the rest of the family in that topic. Respect and trust will enhance development but also it is nice to have somebody become a computer specialist, or chess master, or the best at making gnocchi or making a nice avocado toast, or maybe the go-to guide for Medieval weaponry.
10. Be firm with boundaries regarding work time for everyone. Adults and children alike need to trust that dinners will be together, Saturdays will offer some family time, Sundays are set aside for rest and ritual, etc. At the same time this becomes more difficult, it becomes more essential.

Things I wish I’d done more of:

1. Forgive each other more directly and more immediately. Shouting, “stop bickering!” might bring a short but artificial peace. Issues can fester rather than gaining resolution just because conflicts were misinterpreted as being “merely” temporary or childish and then brushed aside as bothersome noise. Talk through resolutions while issues are manageable so that calloused resentments are never formed.
2. Music (all kinds at all opportunities)
3. Dance (all kinds at all opportunities).
4. Turn off the TV
5. Grow to celebrate wins more often. Don’t let Etsy or your overly festive relative make you think you need to buy special decorations or put on massive party events before you can celebrate. Start at dinner. Focus as much as possible on thankfulness and then take joy in even small victories daily.