Why Kids Struggle With Learning: Is There Too Much To Learn In Too Little Time?
Last Tuesday, I was folding clean laundry on the kitchen counter while my 10-year-old Lila did homework at the other end, a half-eaten bowl of Goldfish crackers and a juice box sweating next to her workbook. She’d been quiet for 20 minutes before she slammed her pencil down so hard the crackers jumped. “I don’t get this. I just don’t get it.” I walked over, and saw the page: 25 problems on equivalent fractions, converting them to decimals, and ordering them from least to greatest. They’d learned adding fractions just two days before.
“When did your teacher introduce this?” I asked. She shrugged. “Yesterday. We have a benchmark test next week, so we have to get all of it done before.” I sat down next to her, and saw her eraser had rubbed a hole right through the page where she’d crossed out her third wrong answer. She blinked back tears and said, “Why do I have to learn all this right now? I still mess up adding fractions sometimes.”
That question hit me, because I’d seen exactly why just a month earlier, when I subbed for Lila’s 4th grade class. I’d been given the pacing guide for that week, and I counted: 10 new math concepts in 5 days, 3 new spelling rules, 2 full social studies topics, and a whole reading chapter to get through. When I asked the regular teacher what to do if half the class didn’t grasp the first concept on Monday, she just shrugged and said “Move on. We can’t fall behind. There’s no time to go back.” I watched that day, as kids who raised their hands to ask questions got told “We’ll cover that after class if we have time,” and we never did.
Instead of pushing her to work through all 25 problems, I pulled the box of Cheerios out of the pantry. We poured 12 of them onto a paper plate, split them into two groups of 6 to show 1/2 equals 6/12, then split them again to show 2/4. We spent 20 minutes just moving the Cheerios around, testing different fractions, no rush. By the end, she was laughing when she figured out 3/4 of 12 Cheerios was enough for me, and 1/4 was enough for her. She got it. But by that point, we didn’t have time to finish all the problems, so I wrote a quick note to her teacher explaining what we’d done, and we left the last five blank.
That’s when I started thinking about how much of what we call “learning struggles” isn’t that kids can’t learn the material—it’s that we’re asking them to learn too much of it too fast. I talked to a 5th grade teacher at back-to-school night last fall, and she said the state added 15 percent more content to the elementary curriculum three years ago, but no one took any old content out. The school day is still the same 6 and a half hours, recess got cut 10 minutes a few years back to make more time for instruction, and there’s still only so much space in a kid’s brain to absorb new information.
This isn’t just a problem for schools to fix, though. There are small things we can do at home that don’t take a lot of extra time, that I’ve found make a big difference. First, if your kid hits a wall on homework, it’s okay to skip the repetitive practice problems to spend extra time on the new concept they don’t get. I’ve been doing this for three years, and I’ve never had a teacher complain. Most of them know the pace is too fast too. A quick 1-sentence note is all it takes, no fight, no stress.
Another thing I do is keep a loose list of 5-minute hands-on activities for common concepts that kids get rushed through. If Lila comes home confused about the water cycle, we boil a cup of water on the stove and hold a cold plate over the top to see condensation. If she’s stuck on area and perimeter, we measure the kitchen table and count how many placemats fit on it. It takes 5 minutes, it doesn’t require any special supplies, and it lets the concept sink in when the school didn’t have time to do that.
For teachers I know who have a little flexibility, they block one unscheduled “catch-up day” every two weeks that isn’t mapped out in the official pacing guide. Some days it’s just going over the concepts half the class missed, some days it’s letting kids dive deeper into something they got curious about that week. One 3rd grade teacher I know told me her kids’ end-of-year test scores went up 10 percent after she started doing this, because the material actually stuck instead of just being crammed for a test and forgotten a week later.
It’s not a perfect fix. Some days I don’t have 20 minutes to pull out Cheerios, because I have to get my older son to soccer practice and make dinner and answer work emails. Some teachers don’t have the flexibility to add a catch-up day, because their school requires them to stick exactly to the pacing guide. Lila got a B on that fraction benchmark test, because we didn’t finish all the review problems, but last weekend when we split a pizza for dinner, she immediately told me that if we split it into 8 slices, 4 slices is half the pizza, which is the same as 2/4, which is the same as 50 percent. That’s the part that matters, right? We’re still figuring it out, day by day, but the more I see of it, the more I’m convinced that a lot of the stress around learning would go away if we just slowed down a little.
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