(upbeat music) - Welcome friends to this episode of the "Everyday Educator" podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Bailey, and I'm excited to spend some time with you today as we encourage one another, learn together, and ponder the delights and challenges that make homeschooling the adventure of a lifetime. Whether you're just considering this homeschooling possibility or deep into the daily delight of family learning, I believe you'll enjoy thinking along with us.

But don't forget, although this online community is awesome, you'll find even closer support in a local CC community. So go to classicalconversations.com and find a community near you today. Well, listeners, I'm excited to welcome you today. And as we look toward the beginning of our fall communities, I've got a great guest who is going to usher you into thinking about the challenge years.

I have with me today, Tim Knott, who is a lead curriculum developer with Classical Conversations Multimedia. Tim, welcome. - Hey, Lisa, good to be with you. - I always like to have times when we can talk and think together. I always learn something new and you always push me to think in a different way about something.

So I'm looking forward to sharing that with our listeners today. I want to ask you as I just get to know you, when you were a little kid, did you like challenges? - I think it depended a lot on what kind of challenge you're talking about. I loved to go and play outside with my brother or my friends and we would build tree forts and go down and explore the woods.

And so we would invent all kinds of challenges for ourselves. And those kinds of challenges were just the best. We would, too much to my mother's chagrin, challenge one another to see who could climb the tallest in the pine tree that had all the little tiny branches at the top.

- Yes, yes, yes. - And I loved the challenges of playing board games with my dad. But other kinds of challenges weren't my favorite. I was never all that terribly motivated by competitive sports. So it kind of depended what kind of challenge you put in front of me. - Yeah, yeah, I think that's really true.

Now, I do think that most of the little kids that I have known have loved pushing the envelope at one time or another. The kind that you're talking about, though, who can throw the rock the farthest, or yeah, who can climb the highest in the tree or go farthest down the path or whatever.

And so, yeah, those kinds of challenges. It resonates with me, too, Tim, your experience, 'cause I never loved those be the fastest runner or the fastest swimmer. Those kinds of challenges did not, they didn't grab me. They didn't grab me. Like personal challenges sometimes did. Could I read all of the books on the third shelf of the library in one summer?

Those kinds of challenges. - So think about as a student, and you can answer for little kid Tim or high school Tim or college Tim. As a student, what challenged you? - I was always excited by and challenged by new ideas, trying to understand what it meant and how it worked.

That was always of great interest to me and a real frustration when someone would put something in front of me and I didn't understand it. And so then I would work hard to get it because I didn't like not knowing, not understanding. - Okay, yeah. - But I'd have to be honest that once I understood the idea of the thing, all the extra work that came along with mastering a skill set around it, I had no interest in those whatsoever.

(laughing) So I didn't mind working to understand a new math concept. But when you gave me the 25 problems to demonstrate that I understood it, that was where the wheels came off for me. (laughing) - So you liked the moment of discovery, but the deeper, get better at it, you could just leave for another day, happily, huh?

- Yeah, sadly, sometimes I think my, what I've received in my greatest challenge was how to do the least amount of that extra work as possible to still do well in my classes. - This is so funny. My husband tells stories like that. And I remember cringing when he would tell our daughters that as they were growing up.

It's like, okay, don't be like daddy. Don't do that. Don't figure it out. Don't let the light dawn on you and then think, okay, the fun part is over. I opt out of the rest of the work. Yeah, yeah. So would you say that you respond to challenges with enthusiasm, at least initially?

- Yeah, generally, yes. There are some where the challenge is put in front of me and I have merely a sense of duty or obligation and therefore approach it in sort of much more sort of business-like approach. But if it's something that I've challenged myself to or that I've discovered as a challenge, then yeah, I tend to be pretty gung-ho, at least about getting started with it.

The finishing, sometimes yes, sometimes no. - Yes, I was gonna ask you, as a grownup, how do you react to learning new things? This, I will be honest. I used to ask this question when I would go and speak at practicums or to small groups of parents. And sometimes it came up with parents who were frustrated with their early teenage children who were dragging their feet about doing this hard thing.

And as I think about it, it did tend to crop up in students who were just entering the challenge years and they were going to be hitting some things for the first time or in new ways. And I would have parents who were bemoaning their students' attitudes. And so I began to ask the parents, how do you respond as an adult to learning new things?

So I'm putting you under the microscope and ask you, Tim. - Yeah, it depends a lot on whether it's something that I'm looking forward to or not. If I want to learn about it or if someone who I trust or has inspired me in some way has presented it to me, then I'm usually enthusiastic about it.

But if it's sort of yet another thing that I look at as a roadblock or again, sort of an obligation, like, oh, well, there's another thing I have to learn how to do. - Yes, right. - Then it may either never become a joy or it may take just some time before it finally, I see that there's something valuable or beautiful about it in its own right.

- You know, I think it is a good reminder to all of us and parents, I'm looking at you. I had the same revelation with my own children. I think it's a good thing for us to stop and consider, how do I and how does my child react to something new, learning something new or facing a new challenge?

It will help you understand how to help your student, how to help yourself, what kind of self-talk you need to produce or what kind of counsel and mentoring you need to give your student. For instance, do you or does your student react to new things with fear? Are they afraid of making a mistake?

Do they react to new things that they don't know how to do with denial? I'm not gonna do that because I don't know if I'm gonna be good at it or not. I'm just gonna avoid it. Do they jump in with both feet with so much enthusiasm that sometimes they don't consider the initial steps that ought to be taken so that success will ensue?

I think it behooves us to think about that on the front end so that we can help ourselves and our students approach learning new things more successfully. - That's good, Lisa. Introducing the new thing in a way that sets the student up for success, right? So that they're not either intimidated by it or think too lightly of it, either one.

It's easier, I think you were mentioning how you felt like as a parent, you would have those moments of frustration with your students. And I wonder if it's because we look back on it and we think, "Oh, I can see it for what it is," but they're looking forward at it and they don't know what we know.

And so they haven't yet figured out that it's valuable or how hard is it really gonna be? - Yep, that is really, it is really valuable. I have a real heart for helping parents reclaim the homeschooling journey as one of family relationships and not just the homeschooling journey as the acquisition of lots of knowledge for your student.

And so any ways that we can mentor our students and have them, newsflash, mentor us as we learn together as a family, not just about our subjects, but about ourselves, about our family, about the world, about the Lord, I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing.

But we have come today to talk about the challenge of the Challenge Program. And so, because moving into the Challenge Program from the world of foundations and essentials is a really big change. It's a change in a lot of ways for students and for the families of those students.

And this time of change is really reflected in spiritual growth, emotional, social, and physical growth. There are a lot of new things to learn as you transition into the challenge years. And Tim, I know as a dad, you have transitioned students into the challenge years. I mean, you're not just a curriculum developer.

You are also a dad who is shepherding young souls. So what stands out to you about that shift into the challenge years? - Yeah, you're right that it's multi-layered. It's multi-dimensioned. And it's not one size fits all. Every student has their own ways that they're gonna grow more quickly or in a particular way than a different student.

We see it physically most easily, right? Some of those girls, they're 12, they suddenly hit that growth spurt and man, they just take off and they're towering over their classmates all of a sudden. Whereas more often the boys are still stuck in sort of their halfling phase. - Yes, yes, yes.

- Haven't quite hit that early teen growth spurt as early, but it will come. So we see it physically, but it happens emotionally and intellectually and spiritually differently for everybody too. Some kids, they hit that prep for challenge A and they are excited and they're looking forward to the extra work and the added responsibility and the day, the whole day away from mom, perhaps.

That's just, they're on the fast track in their own mind to adulthood. And others, they're still very much wanting to be snuggled up reading the Echoes books with mom on the couch for as long as possible and don't really wanna have anything to do with going out and doing something different than what they've known.

So that transition, yeah, it requires gentleness and encouragement, right? To see where the strengths are that you can encourage and to see where the weaknesses or the worries are that you can assuage them and build confidence ahead of time so that that student who has those nervous fears about their peers and the way that they're gonna be treated or that there's this new thing, Latin, that they're gonna encounter.

And I don't know how to do that, but you can prepare them in ways that are more important than doing some kind of an academic bootcamp the summer before a challenge starts. - Yes, I like that. So what are some of the things that you think? 'Cause I can feel some of our listeners thinking, "Okay, I know it's gonna be different.

"I'm gonna have to transition my student "to taking mentoring and instruction "from somebody besides just mom or dad "because my challenge kiddos are gonna be "with this tutor, with this director "for six hours, one day a week. "And they're gonna need to learn "how to follow somebody else's directions.

"And I really need them to know "how to write down their assignments "and schedule out their days." Which by the way, parents, almost every kid is really bad at before they get good at. Making their own schedule is a huge step. But what I hear you saying, Tim, is that there are some really more intangible ways that we as parents can prepare our students for this adjustment.

- Yeah, I think it's easy for us to impose our view of ourselves onto our students, what our fears are, what our fears are for them. And we put those on the student. So we think, well, I'm afraid that they won't do well with having their own schedule and keeping to it.

But that might not be the student's worry at all. Our children, the child might think, "Oh, no, this is great, I've got no trouble with that." - Right, right. Whether or not that's true, that might not be their worry. Yeah. - Yeah. Or it might be that actually what we're doing is we're worried that we're the ones that are gonna have a hard time keeping up with that challenge A student.

And so we sort of secondhand worry on their behalf when really it's our worry, it's our fear. So I think we're talking about that challenge preparation. I think being prepared for yourself as a parent to allow the transition to take time and some unusual dimensions and turns and directions that you're not expecting is also very important.

That we don't think that we, because we're the parent or the teacher or older and wiser have all the answers that we can make it perfect for our child because we can't. But what we can do is walk along with them through it and help them see where they can do better and where we can do better with them.

- I like that, I like that. And that requires conversation and a lot of, and sometimes quietness where we just have to sit with the student and talk about what are you looking forward to in this new year? What do you think is going to be your favorite part?

Is there anything that you know you want help with at the beginning? What are you excited to try? Those kinds of questions open up really great conversations. What are some of the challenges that you have seen for students? Either your own kids, not calling them out by name or students that you've tutored 'cause I know that you have served as challenge tutor before as well.

So what are some of the biggest challenges that you've seen for students moving into challenge? - Yeah, I mean, students will, different students will struggle with different content areas and that's to be expected, right? Some will thrive in math and others will struggle and some will thrive in reading the literature and others will sort of plod their way through it and that's okay.

- Yes, it is. - And making sure that they know that is an important step. But I think that the biggest challenge of challenge for both parent and student is the fact that students are really on a journey toward becoming mature. And as a parent, we have a hard time both letting our student become mature at times and also sometimes knowing how best to help them on that path.

And for students, they too have a hard time because they think that they've arrived in some areas. The student who is like, "I don't need your help with Latin, I got it." And you're like, "Oh, good, that's wonderful." But then you go and after a week or so, you look at all the Latin they've done for the last week and you're like, "This is a bunch of nonsense "that you've done here." - Right.

- "I don't think 'gada' means what you think it means." So, and then you end up with usually some soul-searching and a little bit of attitude wrangling on both sides that you have to work out where did the problem come and when should it have been addressed and should they have come to you?

Should you have gone to them? Do you need to check their work every day or can once a week be an okay check-in? Those negotiations are super uncomfortable for parent and student. But that's what growing toward maturity really looks like. It's not just some system. There's not a method that says if you, in challenge A, you check in daily and then in challenge B, you check every other day.

And then it doesn't work that way. Sometimes you have to check once a week for this semester and next semester you find out you gotta check every day. - Or for this subject strand or for this assignment, yes. - So to me, the big struggle is it's managing helping students to learn to manage themself, to be self-controlled, to be self-aware.

And frankly, as adults, we're often not too great at that either. - Yeah, I was gonna say, man, that's a continuing struggle when it's the blind leading the blind some days. - It is, but we need to walk it along with them and be humble as we admit that these are things that we still work on too.

- And you know, that actually teaches a better lesson than any they'll ever get from a book because this is a living, breathing human person that they're living with and watching. And when they see us extend grace to ourselves and to others within the family, they learn what it's like to receive and extend grace and to be merciful and to be patient with yourself and to see maturity as a journey, not as, you know, it's not like "I Dream of Jeannie" where you could just immediately blink your eyes and pop to a whole new place.

I'm going to go from immature to perfectly mature in one blink of the eye or one shake of the head. No, it is a journey and you get better and then you regress and then you go a little farther and then you regress. And it's a growth, it's growth.

I think that's the challenge of challenge is that our students are entering a new period of growth but it doesn't signify arrival, hardly at any point. - Yeah, it's constant, right? It's constant growth at different rates, but constant growth. - Yes, yes, yes. So give some, I want you to think of your own experience both as a parent and as a tutor.

What are some ways that we as parents can help our students adjust sometimes to the more mundane changes like that there are external due dates that mom doesn't necessarily set all of them because you do need to finish reading this book before community day in order to participate in the conversation.

So what are some ways that we as parents can help our students adjust maybe to the workload, maybe to different kinds of responsibilities, whatever? - Yeah, that's a topic we could talk about for a long time. - For a long time, I was going to say this will not, I was going to give the disclaimer of this will not be an exhaustive list.

- Yeah, no, one of the things that first comes to my mind is St. Augustine talked about the Christian life has a constant pursuit of ordering our loves to make sure that first things are first. And as adults, we should have a better perspective on life than our students.

They're young, they haven't lived enough yet. They haven't had enough experiences or heard enough or been through the hard times to come through the other side the way that we have. And so we should be constantly helping them to assess what is of first importance so that those things can be done, so those things can be tackled first and done best.

And then the things that fall farther and farther down that list of less important, those are the things that you learn to say, I can't get to that, or I'll do enough of that, but I need to give my energy somewhere else. As Christian homeschooling parents, our church and our Christian faith and our walk has to be the top of that pile.

And so if we don't help our students to see that church attendance and loving your neighbor and spending time in the word of God and prayer, if we don't show them that those things are important, but instead demand of them academic work all the time, we're training them toward a life that's disordered in its loves.

If you mentioned reading the book in time to have the community conversation, that may not be where the student wants to spend their time. They may really love their math studies and really wanna do all the math problems because it brings them joy and they feel like they're good at it.

And they don't wanna read the book and they'll use the math as an excuse to not get the book read. And there's nothing wrong with doing the math, it's a good thing. But if they're giving all their energy there and none of it is the thing that's gonna love their neighbor by being prepared for the conversation community, we've let them err, we've let them be foolish in that.

So again, it's a question of wisdom, which is always a really hard thing. That's hard for us as parents. It's hard for them, but to walk through this process with them in it is the training ground for them to grow in that wisdom by seeing how we approach those choices, how we help them approach those choices.

And then ultimately, when they start making more of the choices on their own, how we help them to assess the choices that they've already made and to learn from where they erred. - That's really good. What I'm sensing from you is that one of your best tips for parents would be a constant conversation with your student about family, well, about sharing family expectations.

What's important to our family? What do I, as your parent, think is the most important thing for our family to do? Maybe it's not do 40 pages of Latin translation. Maybe it is, like you said, spending time with the Lord, supporting our family mission, loving our church and community, and loving our neighbor while we do the assignments that are set out for us for the week.

I love the whole idea of, as parents, we are mentoring and growing these children to be better humans, virtuous humans who love God. We're not raising students, right? We're not raising students. We don't want our children to grow up necessarily to be lifelong students, but we do want our children to grow up to be lovers of God and lovers of the church and lovers of their family and their community.

- Yeah, and those are really the lifelong skills, right? - Yes. - The challenge years are, they're the practice gym, right? The training gym for life, and there's a lot in them, like the challenge years have a lot of different things, but all of them are like different equipment for training.

No one of those strands is the most important strand. No one of those strands can teach you everything you need to know. They all work together in different ways to help you to learn and grow. - But no one of them is all of it. - Right, so I'm picking up on what you just said.

So none of the strands is the most important strand. And what I feel like you're saying is that the academic stuff, just knowing how to graph a line or balance a chemical equation or write a refutation in a paper, those things are not the most important. So what are the important life skills that we hope our students are learning as they practice on this great content?

- So, I was, we're in the middle of the Olympics right now, right? - Yes, and I am loving it, yes. - Yeah, and I, you know, I would love in some sense to have the time to watch all of the-- - I know. - All the events and of course you can't, though these days they make it amazingly available.

But I heard a comment during one of the track and field events just this week where the commentator is pointing out that it wasn't too long ago that the best sprinters would also have been the athletes that would have dominated events like the hurdles and the long jump. And he was saying these days you rarely see these sort of multi-discipline athletes at the Olympics.

And he said part of that is the fact that the level of competition has just ratcheted up to be so high that you have to sort of be a specialist at whatever it is that you do. But there was something in what he said that really resonated with me that the core sort of competencies, the most important things about being a sprinter or a high jumper or a long jumper or a hurdle runner are all really the same things.

That there's strength and endurance and agility and quickness and flexibility. And that ultimately the little differences between them that are timing your paces to get over the hurdle or lifting your body high up off the ground and twisting to get over the bar, those are sort of micro skills compared to the macro skills that are being in control of your body and being strong the way that the track and field athlete has to be.

And so as I was thinking about that and this discussion that we're gonna have today, I think that the strands for challenge they're like that allegory I was just sharing, like the gym, that you go and you work out and you work out different parts of your body at different exercise stations.

But ultimately the goal is not that you have strong biceps or that you have strong quadriceps, but it's that your body is fit, that you're an all around strong, flexible, fast athlete if you're that kind of an Olympic athlete. For us, looking at challenge, we're looking at it saying, well, we don't practice math just so we can be good mathematicians.

We practice math because it helps us think about the world around us in some particular ways. It helps us to hone some certain kinds of thinking that make us better thinkers about all kinds of things and not just numbers. We read good books, not just because we need to be good readers, though that's a good thing on its own.

We read those good books because they give us a broad perspective and access to knowledge from past generations and places that we've never been and may never go from the inside of people's heads that we can't otherwise get to. And as we think about that, we learn empathy and moral imagination.

And there's things in there that we can't learn from mathematics. And so all of them together work to strengthen us, to not make us just a good sprinter or a good high jumper or a good mathematician or a good essay writer, but they make us a whole person, a whole thinker, a whole experiencer of life who can make connections quickly between all the things that they're experiencing 'cause we live in a whole, we live in a cosmos that that's one reality that we're encountering in various and different ways.

- Wow, I love this so very much. And parents, if you came thinking that this was gonna be how to set your student's schedule or what books to buy for the different challenge level, I want you to know there are places to find that. You can look in the bookstore, you can talk to your product sales specialist or to your challenge director, and they will make sure that you know all of the resources.

And guess what? You have got experienced parents in your community that will love to talk to you about 30 different ways to make a challenge student's schedule work for your family. But what Tim has offered us today is a real perspective on the challenge of the challenge program. The fact that the real big challenge is that we are leading these young people to become mature humans who can manage themselves, who are self-aware and who are developing self-control, who are learning to be empathetic and to recognize and exercise their moral imagination, to hone the skills of precision and recognition of big ideas and connector of big ideas.

And that's the real challenge of challenge, to realize that it's a journey of discovery and maturing that we are taking with our students. I just really appreciate your thoughts, Tim. - That's a really important one is the community piece. We've spent a lot of time talking about the academics of it and parent and student, but navigating life in community, that takes a degree of maturity far beyond just managing the academics.

Any of us who have been in churches where there was trouble or been at the family dinner table around Thanksgiving time, we know that there are fraught relationships and there are right ways and wrong ways to deal with people and our children need our help in learning to navigate conflict.

And when that girl is mean or that boy is rough or that kid comes in unprepared and he's on my debate team or that one always likes to show off and talk all the time and won't shut up, what do I do? That piece of community can be the most frustrating part and maybe leads more people to throw their hands up about loving their neighbor than anything else.

But how we walk with our children through dealing with difficult social relationships, social settings, I mean, you look at the world around us today and we desperately need that as a society, people who can bear with other people who they have disagreements with or find even someone that you don't wanna be with, but you need to like a neighbor, right?

But to help our students grow through those means, bearing with those struggles in community and not just giving up on it the first time that things get hard any more than we give up on challenge A because Latin seems insurmountable this year or on challenge B because mock trial or whatever, those struggles are, don't give up, the lesson that we teach them when we give up on things is maybe a more powerful and worse lesson than when we let them fail at some academics from time to time.

- Very wise, I appreciate those words. I really do, I think this is great. Thank you for sharing with us today. Parents, I hope that this is helping you wrap your mind around preparing for the challenge years and for the community year that's now at hand. I know you probably are looking for things like notebooks and backpacks and books, and those are good things too.

And Tim, you can actually speak to this. One thing that I wanted to mention to our families as they look for the resources, the books that they're gonna need for their different challenge classes this year, we have the Copper Lodge Library, which is Classical Conversations multimedia imprint. It's a book series that preserves and presents all these timeless stories from the past.

And a lot of these are books that are used in your students' challenge exposition strand. We've got new to the Copper Lodge Library this year, Pride and Prejudice, The Secret Garden, and English Epic Poetry. Tim, you work with the content developers who put some of these Copper Lodge Library titles together.

What's so great about them? Why should families look at Copper Lodge Library instead of some used bookstore to find some of these books? - So as classical Christian educators, we believe in the true, the good, and the beautiful, and these books are really all three things. They point us with introductions and forwards and footnotes toward true ways to understand the text when we need some help.

They're beautiful additions. Our designers have done a wonderful job putting them together and putting clothes on the words that make them so attractive to us. And they're just good. They're good for, they're useful to us. It's great when our students have all the same versions and community so that they can literally be on the same page together instead of scrambling, looking for, wait, what page is that in your version?

Where's that in mine? I can't find where we are. - Yeah. That's really good. That's really good. So you guys go and look for these if you are interested in just finding out more about Copper Lodge Library and what other titles are available, you can go to copperlodgelibrary.com and find more about this.

Also, you can find out about Copper Lodge Library selections on our bookstore site. So you guys go, prepare, and we will pray that the Lord brings you the best year ever as you and your students meet the challenge of challenge. Thanks, Tim. I appreciate you being here. Listeners, I'll see you next time.

All right? Bye-bye. (gentle music) you you