Do you hit a certain set of speed bumps or potholes every day? Maybe there's a particular gouge in the road that makes you cringe every morning, while your colleague has smooth sailing on their whole drive. In fact, maybe you’re the only one in the office who drives up to the building via that one side road, hitting those same potholes every single day. It slows you down and adds wear and tear to your vehicle, though your colleagues are none the wiser.
Kids can experience this same phenomenon in education. Sometimes a specific topic just trips them up, slows them down, and interrupts their otherwise smooth “commute” through their grade. And sometimes, the wear and tear on their psyche of hitting speed bumps over and over again can add up and cause them to fall behind.
Like us adults, a lot of the time kids can make simply make their way around or through the bumps and holes, enduring and persevering. Potholes are a part of life that we sometimes have to learn to manage. They're not always ideal but we can’t always eliminate them, and sometimes they don't always cause too much of an interruption. They're just another thing to overcome, and we learn to drive carefully.
But sometimes, they're very interruptive. They really force us to put the brakes on and in extreme cases, make certain routes impassable. So, what exactly are these problematic potholes?
Educational Potholes
On an individual level, there are certain concepts and ideas that we each have particular trouble wrapping our minds around. Sometimes, in school, these topics can be foundational for future understanding and advancement, causing struggles down the road. Perhaps the concept doesn’t synchronize well with the student’s default learning framework. Perhaps it’s a universally tricky topic that was poorly taught. Perhaps the student was uniquely missing critical information due to circumstances beyond his or her control.
Moreover, kids are just learning to be adaptive to the world presented to them. They can take every obstacle very seriously; a topic that doesn’t click can feel like an insurmountable mountain, causing a great deal of frustration and panic.
What can be done?
Construction Crew
Fortunately, there is a lot that can be done in terms of road repair and even vehicle augmentation. A little bit of tutoring can go a long way in terms of filling in those holes. By taking advantage of a supplementary education solution early, we are able to help the student get in front of the challenge before it becomes a bigger issue.
Supplemental education is extremely particularizable to a student's individual needs. If the pacing of the original class contributed to the lack of understanding, we can adjust it in tutoring. If the topic was explained in a highly unclear manner, we can switch tactics. If they need more examples or more practice, we can facilitate that. If they felt too disconnected from the learning experience, we can engage them through private lessons or in small groups. All of these issues can be addressed with a little time spent in supplemental education.
Pothole patching is what we do best. A student might not need anywhere close to an entire year’s worth of review. They may not even need anything long term. Tutoring can be used to flexibly address particular dimensions of the learning process, highly specific topics, in a way that fits in with the student schedule. Or, tutoring can be used as a way to keep up with ongoing road maintenance as a way to sweepingly review grade topics as they are done in class. Either way, this helps to prevent falling further behind. It’s a huge confidence booster and helps students learn that hang ups are entirely manageable.
Vehicle Augmentation
As adults, we understand that when we see a pothole in the road, there are a few things we can do to manage it: we can drive slower and go over it gently, we can go around it, checking to see if it's safe to inch into the other lane for a second, or we can take an alternate route next time. Kids are still learning this kind of adaptively strategic thinking. Often, when children encounter a question or a concept that is particularly tricky, they get stuck. They don't know how to move on or how to find a way around it.
This is why it is critical when working with children, that we are particularly mindful of topics that post hang up challenges and address them when they arise. If we know that kids are prone to be bogged down, we need to be prepared to help some prevent that from happening.
Furthermore, the more that kids experience the feeling of having had a challenge and overcome it, the more that they start to develop the neural pathways to believe and accept that hang ups are something that they can overcome, and that they are likely to overcome it next time, too. The risk-averse creatures that we are, we have a bias towards seeing each new challenge as novel and frightening, and it's easy to get overwhelmed. But the more we practice successfully overcoming challenges, the more we will believe them to be less of a threat. This develops our belief in ourselves, not from idealism, but from empiricism.
Supplemental education is, in essence, an adaptive strategy to work our way around a problem. By making use of additional resources, such as a tutor’s gladly-given time, we model for our kids that you can remain unfazed in the face of a challenge, know that it's important to overcome, and find a way to do so.
And that's what we all want our kids to learn: that they can find a way around it—that they can train their vehicles to be better at tackling challenges and trust in themselves more as a result. That their little motors can keep on trucking; that they can get to the destinations they want for themselves. Roads may not be perfect, our cars may need repairs, but their growing brain-powered engines can do it. Even if they have to make a couple of rest stops on the way, they can make it all the way home.
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