Shall we talk about "pushing"?

[chocolate-chip chooky]

17 hours ago, Shoes+Ships+SealingWax said:

I think the positive association with the term “challenge” for many stems from contrast with their own experience. Challenge is equated with engagement because, as you noted, easy is boring. When I say that I want my DS to be challenged, it’s not that I want him unprepared or overwhelmed - it’s that I want him to be deeply engaged. I want him to be excited to tackle novel tasks, rather than daunted because he’s never been asked to do that before. I was woefully under-challenged in school & as a result I spent a lot of time disengaged from learning; I want a different experience for DS!

This is such an interesting thread, and I love this post.

 

[lewelma]

On 12/19/2022 at 7:57 AM, EKS said:

I'm wondering if anyone would like to discuss the advantages and pitfalls of challenging HG+ students.  

 

19 hours ago, Shoes+Ships+SealingWax said:

I think the positive association with the term “challenge” for many stems from contrast with their own experience. Challenge is equated with engagement because, as you noted, easy is boring. When I say that I want my DS to be challenged, it’s not that I want him unprepared or overwhelmed - it’s that I want him to be deeply engaged.

So the word 'challenge' is used in 2 different ways in these 2 posts.  1) EKS's OP, challenge = too much, too hard, difficult, or pushing. 2) Challenge = Engagement. I have heard the word used in both ways.  I can't see pitfalls of challenging a kid if challenging=engagement, but clearly there is if challenging = too hard/difficult/much. 

I think right now in the USA, challenge sometimes = long hours rather than either of the above definitions. I've heard on the board people talk about a challenging HS program and kids doing 60 hours of work a week plus extra curricular. This is where I think challenging can = pushing. Pushing from either the parent or school or just society in general. Kids doing more than they really want to and more than they really should. 

If a kid is engaged, then I don't think that 'pushing' applies. Engaged to me means that a kid wants to do the work and is enjoying what they are learning. I don't see anything negative in that, which is why my goal was always engagement.

Edited January 8, 2023 by lewelma

[8filltheheart]

I definitely don't push my kids, but I do want them to think.  My 7th grader is inherently lazy and will always take the path of least resistance.  When I use the word challenge, it means it takes effort to think through.  Not that it is beyond ability. but equally it isn't so mundane that it can be accomplished rote.

[EKS]

13 minutes ago, 8filltheheart said:

When I use the word challenge, it means it takes effort to think through.  Not that it is beyond ability. but equally it isn't so mundane that it can be accomplished rote.

This is what I meant by challenge in my OP.

When you have a kid for whom being 3+ grade levels advanced (in a homeschool setting) is like nothing, but who balks when things get slightly uncomfortable, how do you deal with it?

I see now that not learning how to do hard things means that he doesn't know how to do hard things.  

[lewelma]

1 hour ago, EKS said:

when things get slightly uncomfortable, how do you deal with it?

I see now that not learning how to do hard things means that he doesn't know how to do hard things.  

I make sure to run with whatever a kid is passionate about. Older boy, it was math. He was desperate to learn math, so was willing to do hard things.  For my younger, it was the desire to conquer they dysgraphia and to feel more normal. So I used engaging content to deal with the misery of the hard work required to come to terms with his learning disability. A kid has to *want* to work hard, or clearly you are in the pushing category. So I spent a lot of my time on the psychology of learning. Slow, ever so slow, influence to develop a child willing to put in the work. This was a ten year project for my younger. 

In addition, for most kids hard work cannot be maintained for many hours each day. For my older boy who was more driven, he could work hard for 5 hours/day, for my younger it was 2 hours. I had to work side-by-side with my younger and adapt the program almost constantly to get 4 hours out of him, even in high school. That is what I mean about the hours being challenging. For my younger boy, more than 2 hours was challenging, so I needed to find a way to make it possible. I needed to train him how to work and how to stay engaged, and this took a LOT of time. It also required a lot of co-learning and cooperative learning. 

The other thing I did with my kids was project based learning (PBL) rather than silo-ed textbook style learning for some less-interesting subjects. This was an excellent way to increase engagement and thus learning. For my younger, he could have studied a geography textbook and then I would have had to push him every day. Instead we did big projects - like the Africa projects I described above. For my older, when he needed to do an Economics course, I could have given him an economics textbook but he would have hated it because he was not interested in the subject, so I would have needed to constantly push him. Instead we did Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century and we did it together, taking turns reading it out loud and looking up everything we did not know.

I am firmly in the camp that an engaged kid retains their learning better. You can study and get good grades on a test, but if you are not engaged, you forget the content very rapidly in my experience. 

[EKS]

@lewelma

It's great when it works out. 

My older one is like your younger one, motivated by wanting to overcome his learning disability.  And he is like your older one in that he is passionate about his field.  

My younger one is different.  I did all of the stuff, or versions of it, that you are talking about with him.  Meaningful study, going with passions,  working alongside him, scaffolding, gradually removed the scaffold, all the things.  I've gone on and on on here about meaningful work versus challenging work.  And here I am with a kid who simply doesn't know how to do hard things and has no idea why one would want to.  Because he has never actually done anything difficult, certainly never done it on his own, and he's never experienced the satisfaction. 

[UHP]

23 minutes ago, EKS said:

And here I am with a kid who simply doesn't know how to do hard things and has no idea why one would want to.  Because he has never actually done anything difficult, certainly never done it on his own, and he's never experienced the satisfaction. 

I might be asking you to stick your neck out, but what are some concrete ways this comes up? Difficult things you wish he'd be willing (able?) to do?

[lewelma]

53 minutes ago, EKS said:

It's great when it works out. .....

 Because he has never actually done anything difficult, certainly never done it on his own, and he's never experienced the satisfaction. 

Agreed, it is great when it works out. I'm not saying that this is always the case. 

For my younger, until university, he has never done anything difficult on his own. We did *all* subjects together in high school. He *never* worked independently. So I get it. Basically, if he had to do it independently, he simply would not do it. And I made the choice to embrace this need for cooperative learning and not require him to learn independently so he would not fail. This was my choice, and I stand by it. So how has this impacted him in university?

1) He can take notes on lectures and he can make study sheets on his own. Impressive given he had never done this before.

2) He can read short articles independently (like a couple of pages), but cannot read textbooks or long articles. This is a bit of an OCD thing (he does tend towards it, so I'm not kidding). If he absolutely has to, he reads them out loud to himself, but most of the time he can either use youtube video to explain content, or use search and read only selected paragraphs in longer articles. He is working slowly to improve this, because he will need to read nuanced articles with complex interlinking ideas as he moves through his program, and reading only selected paragraphs won't work. He has also been known to call his dad and work through a tricky article with him in his first year at university.

3) He does all his projects, labs, writing with friends. They brainstorm together and critique each other's work. Luckily for him, this is allowed explicitly in courses. Collaborative brainstorming, independent writing.

4) Actual writing, he has to work with either the writing center or with me to be able to structure his writing. But he is becoming more and more able to do this on his own. This is just the learning disability in its last stages. He was simply not fully ready for university level writing when he went to university. But given that he could not write *at all* at the age of 12 (couldn't physically write, could not spell cat, could not find a period, could not structure a paragraph, etc), we have done well. I think in 2 more years he will be completely independent. However, when he writes, he does it with others also working on their own work but in the same room.

5) Jobs. We have talked about him needed to make sure that any job he has is cooperative and that he will not be doing a lot of independent work. He has considered jobs like professional mediator, mayor, hazards communicator, environmental activist.  As long as he knows that he just doesn't work independently, then he can plan a life to embrace what he does so well. 

I will argue that a HG+ child with a learning disability is a tricky situation. So yes, we could have held him back from university because he was not fully ready, but we chose not to. We chose to give him the complexity of ideas that he loves, and give him the learning supports that he still requires. 

But overall, I would argue that the need for independence is overrated. I think some kids just can't do it, and if you require it, they will fail. We chose to not let him fail by changing his high school requirements. So YES to challenging material, but NO to doing it independently.

Edited January 8, 2023 by lewelma

[mckittre]

I struggle with this with my 13yo 8th grader. I never thought about "pushing" when he was younger, because he always filled his spare time with amazing in-depth learning in whatever he was passionate about at the time. But that became less true as he entered middle school. And while he's fine with content being difficult, and hates things that are boring or easy, he also doesn't want to spend any more time doing work than is necessary. My 12yo 6th grader is in public school, mostly for social reasons, but also because she likes the structure, and also likes that it's easy to get As and then come home and just be done with school.

My kids can be engaged and interested in things, but neither of them seem to have any ambitious, competitive, driven, or goal-seeking personality traits. It's hard for me to really understand and work with, because I was the opposite.

When I go skiing with them, they toodle along up the hill at an annoyingly slow pace every time, even as they now have the physical capacity to go much faster. When I was their age, I would have wanted to prove I could keep up with the adults. They could keep up, but don't want to. 

So with academic subjects I end up telling my homeschooled kid: "next year I have to give you credits for your subjects, and kids in school are expected to work for X hours on each subject so you probably should too." But that's a rather unsatisfying and ineffective way to motivate someone, and in subjects where he's already well ahead, it's hard to justify. Especially working in the same room as two work-at-home parents that have deliberately chosen to work less than full time, with a huge amount of freedom and flexibility -- we've never modeled a required hours sort of life.

We tend to end up with stuff that is challenging in input level, but not workload. Exacerbated by the fact that he considers all writing to be complete torture. I hope this will get better with time, or I worry he won't be at all ready for college-style work when the time comes, even though he's already ready for some of the content.

[Clarita]

15 hours ago, mckittre said:

My kids can be engaged and interested in things, but neither of them seem to have any ambitious, competitive, driven, or goal-seeking personality traits. It's hard for me to really understand and work with, because I was the opposite.

My mom would say you don't know what your kids are going to be like as adults when they are teens. Her daughter (me) was bare minimum liked to be done with school after 3pm kind of kid through high school and absolutely not competitive. (Both my parents were/are highly competitive.) Thing is even though I was not ready for college-style work I had an interest and a little bit of passion for what I was studying so I learned how to do college-style work in college like the majority of students. From there ended up doing pretty well professionally.    

[Guest]

I have 1 who can tolerate being pushed academically, but really balks at being pushed socially. However, this one changed dramatically between the ages of 13 and 14, and is now taking more social risks without needing to be "pushed." When we did try to "push" this kid socially, they made it very, very clear they could/would NOT be pushed. Ask me whether that was a fun time for us 😅🤯

 The other kid balks at being pushed, period. For that kid, we are encouraging and making space for self-directed learning in areas of high personal interest, incentivizing the areas of high importance to us (note incentivize vs push), and dropping the "nice to have but not absolutely necessary" stuff. We have to pick our battles, so to speak, exactly because we don't want things to be confrontational all the time, and we want the child to develop a sense of self efficacy and confidence. I'll have to report back in 2-4 years and tell you all how it turned out....

Seeing my one kid change so drastically as they transitioned into the teen years, I have a lot of hope for kids who seem to be stalled or languishing in some area of development. @lewelma's experience also gives me hope. The kids are on their own time schedule and sometimes they just can't be pushed or made to fit an expected timeline. But they get there eventually, or they figure out how to get by.

 

 

[Clemsondana]

On 1/7/2023 at 9:37 PM, EKS said:

@lewelma

It's great when it works out. 

My older one is like your younger one, motivated by wanting to overcome his learning disability.  And he is like your older one in that he is passionate about his field.  

My younger one is different.  I did all of the stuff, or versions of it, that you are talking about with him.  Meaningful study, going with passions,  working alongside him, scaffolding, gradually removed the scaffold, all the things.  I've gone on and on on here about meaningful work versus challenging work.  And here I am with a kid who simply doesn't know how to do hard things and has no idea why one would want to.  Because he has never actually done anything difficult, certainly never done it on his own, and he's never experienced the satisfaction. 

I have one like this.  I think that for some it's something of a personality type that isn't easily changed with education methods.  Depending on how you think about it, it might be a combo of ADHD and anxiety (with a dash of perfectionism/all or nothing thinking), or Enneagram type 7, or probably some segment of any personality profile that you might use to help understand other people.  It's a different wiring.  For my kid, there is no project that is interesting enough to actually want to do.  Many activities (academics, sports, music) come easily, none is worth doing any non-mandatory work with.  This kid is astonished that sibling chooses to run and train to get better at sport, and works through necessary scout badges with only some reminders, and practices Science Olympiad independently.  Kid does similar activities, but only practices if a coach is watching, and only is only as focused as the coach forces the team to be.  Completion of a project, whether cleaning or academic, isn't met with satisfaction but with relief that nobody is making kid do something they don't want to do at that moment.  

I have talked about things kid would like to learn and have tried forming courses out of interests.  Kid is blunt is saying that they don't want to learn anything just to learn it.  Kid was interested in cooking, so one middle school year I planned a course that would be a hybrid gardening (biology) and cooking (kitchen chemistry) course.  We could do soil testing, track seed growth, watch videos about nature, watch/read Alton Brown and then try a recipe, etc.  The only output was to journal/draw in a 5x7 notebook.  For the first week kid did great things and thought it was reasonably fun.  We labeled parts of plants and learned why ice cream is different that sorbet.  By week 2 there were complaints, and by week 3 kid was done.  It turns out that gardening is too hot and dirty, growing herbs isn't much fun, and baking anything not from a mix requires too much effort, what with getting out ingredients and having to measure.  It's how I convinced spouse to get a greenhouse, so it's not a total loss, but still.  The only way that any work gets done is with deadlines linked to consequences like not getting to do an activity, because kid loves the social aspect of extracurriculars.  

It's why I group everything - social, academic, extracurricular - together in my 'learn to do challenging things' thinking.  This kid does things that many would find challenging, like performing in front of the church, but kid doesn't actually find that to be stressful and actually enjoys it.  But, placing an order at a restaurant, learning an unfamiliar math concept (even if not difficult for kid), or being asked to try a new technique in sport can prompt unexpected drama. Learning to manage any of it is learning to manage challenge, and my hope is that it's broadly applicable.  

On another note, the posts about learning how to learn and efficiency are interesting.  For my other kid, efficient learning has often been part of the goal for that kid because kid wants to use time elsewhere.  Mastering large amounts of content isn't the primary goal, but making good use of time is.  Mostly for this kid, it's been about being intentional.  If you want to spend  hours perusing various sources for history, knock yourself out.  sometimes kid does!  But, if you don't, then work in a focused manner for an hour, do what you intend to do, and then spend an hour reading for pleasure and another working out.  Nobody is perfect at this, but it works well for this kid, especially during busy times.  This doesn't work for younger, who will spend much longer complaining about having to do a task and procrastinating about the task than the task actually takes. I've seen this kid sit and stare at a book or laptop for an hour or 2 rather than pick it up and do the work.  

[lewelma]

I've been thinking more about my younger boy. He is so accomplished now that it is hard to believe where we came from. These stories people are sharing sound so much like him when he was younger. From just a little boy, my ds would do nothing for hours. Not daydreaming, not thinking, just waiting. Waiting for something to happen but never making it happen himself. When he was 18 months old, we would visit friends, and he would sit next to me for 2 hours. Just looking. Doing nothing. Only a decade later, did I realise that he was not doing nothing, he was watching and learning. However, we were a WTM family and my older boy had a strong academic load, my dh was getting a PhD, and I was always studying to keep up with my older. By the time my younger ds was 10, he told us that he didn't feel like he fit in our family because he didn't love learning and wasn't passionate about anything. 

I came to understand that his love for the social side of things was what he was passionate about, and that if I was going to make him a success, that I needed to work with this passion. He had to believe that he was a successful human right now, as is, in order for me to convince him to engage fully in life. He didn't need to change; he could be himself. And this process started with me and how I viewed his passions. Instead of focusing on what he hated - book work, I increased his extracurricular activities and dropped his academic load to 4 hours (all of which were done with me throughout high school). He went to 10 extracurricular activities each week, and by 12 years old he got there on his own by bus, scooter, or walking. I considered these activities to be the learning that he needed. As an HG+ kid whose speciality is charisma and leadership, I came to believe that these activities were his school work. We would talk about what he saw, how people interacted, how he could engage with different types of people. We would compare his experiences to mine and his father's social/leadership experiences. We found common threads. By the time he was 14, I started getting cool books out on leadership and we would read them as a family at dinner and talk about them. Basically, I worked very hard to embrace the person that he was/is, rather than push him into an academic box. 

So how did I 'challenge' him with the above program. Well, actually, I didn't have to, he challenged himself to study people. It was just in his nature. And I came to understand that I didn't even need to know what he had learned, or talk about it. By allowing and encouraging this kind of learning, the learning was happening without me being involved. As for academics, he had 1.5 hour math/science with me that I ramped up to meet his level, interest, and motivation on that day. I met him where he was at, and what he was willing to do on a daily basis. We also did 2.5 hours of writing a day to remediate his dysgraphia, and I folded in all sorts of topics into this time. At night, his dad read to him and they discussed complexity, or we would watch Shakespeare movies, or listen to audiobooks. He really did not *read* much, because he was struggling at the time with a form of OCD which causes you to reread sentences. He left high school with a solid understanding of math and science, and a profound understanding of complexity of human nature that we achieved through university level work in literature and geography, and through his own focused effort to watch and understand people. 

The point I am making here is that you may just not be able to force a kid into an academic box. Personally, I chose not to 'push' an academic load, instead I worked with the boy that he was to create a learning environment that loved. And over the years because he loved his life, he began to set goals for himself and embrace learning.

I do remember all those years when he read the same library books on volcanoes, over and over, with me thinking that he was choosing 'easy' and not going after something challenging. Well, now he is majoring in Hazards with a focus on politics, communication, and the people side of things. So it has come full circle. 

Edited January 11, 2023 by lewelma