Why It Feels Like Things Are Getting Worse Before They Get Better (For Kids Learning New Skills)
The rubber eraser crumbs were piled an inch high next to Lila’s math worksheet last Tuesday, when she pushed her chair back so hard it scraped the linoleum and said, “I was good at this last week. Why am I worse now?” My half-eaten bowl of taco soup sat cooling on the counter, and I felt that familiar twist in my gut— I used to teach third grade, so I know this pattern, but it’s different when it’s your own kid sitting across from you, eyes shiny with frustration.
Two weeks earlier, Lila had come home with her first multi-digit division worksheet, and we’d finished it in 15 minutes flat. Every problem was two digits divided by one, most had answers she could pull from memorized multiplication facts. She got 8 out of 10 right, chattered about her new hamster while she worked, and I didn’t think twice about it. Then last week, the problems changed. Now they’re three digits divided by one, with remainders, and each problem needs five separate steps: write the first quotient, multiply, subtract, bring down the next number, repeat. Suddenly, she’s getting 5 out of 10 right, if we’re lucky. She crumples paper, she says she’s bad at math, she asks if she can go back to doing “easy division.”
I texted her teacher that night, just to check I wasn’t missing something, and she wrote back exactly what I would have said to a panicking parent five years ago: She’s not regressing. She’s growing. The old easy way of doing division doesn’t work anymore, so she’s having to rebuild her process from scratch. In between the old habit and the new habit, things get messy. That mess looks like getting worse, but it’s actually the first step to getting better.
When I was teaching full time, I saw this play out every month. There was a kid named Javi who was working on reading comprehension, doing fine with one-paragraph stories, then when we moved to full chapters, his test scores dropped 15 points in a month. His mom came in convinced he needed extra after-school tutoring, but what was happening was he’d learned to skim short passages to find the right answer, and that trick didn’t work anymore. He had to unlearn skimming, learn to track plot and character over pages, and in that in-between time, he got more answers wrong. It looked like he was getting worse, but by the end of the semester, his scores were 20 points higher than they’d ever been. I saw it with handwriting, with times tables, even with classroom behavior— kids who start speaking up more after being quiet get more detentions for talking out of turn, because they’re learning when to speak and when not to, and that’s messy.
The hardest part for most of us parents and teachers is that we’ve bought into the idea that progress should always feel like progress. We expect every week to have a little more right answers, a little less frustration. But that’s not how deep learning works. So what do you do when it feels like everything is sliding backward? I’ve picked up a few small, concrete things that work, from my classroom and my own kitchen table.
First, I stopped saying “It’s okay, you’ll get it” when Lila complains. That feels like a lie to her, because right now it’s not okay, and she is getting more wrong. Instead, we pull out last week’s worksheet and lay it next to this week’s, and we compare the problems side by side. I ask her “Which of these looks harder?” She always stares for a second then says “This week’s, duh, these have extra numbers.” Then I say “Right. You’re not worse at division. You’re doing harder division. Of course you’re going to mess up more right now.” That just names what’s actually happening, instead of brushing off her frustration. That alone calms her down most nights.
Next, we started having her say every step out loud as she works. No more silently scribbling answers. If she’s working 173 divided by 5, she has to say “Five goes into one zero times, so I’ll look at 17. Five goes into 17 three times, three times five is 15, subtract 15 I get two, bring down the three…” It takes a little longer, but it means when she skips a step, we both catch it right away, instead of ending up with a wrong answer at the end and having to start over. I don’t correct her if she messes up. I just say “Wait, what did you do after you brought down the three?” and she almost always catches it herself.
We also added a little sticky note to the corner of every worksheet, just for checks. Every time she catches a mistake before I point it out, we put a check on the note. Last week, she had six checks. She didn’t get any more right answers than the week before, but when she finished, she held up the sticky note and said “I caught more mistakes than last week.” That’s progress she can see, instead of just looking at all the red pen marks.
It’s been three weeks, and things aren’t perfect. Lila still complains about division most nights. She still pushes her chair back and says she’s bad at math once a week. She still gets more wrong than she did that first easy week two weeks ago. But the eraser crumbs don’t pile up quite as high, and she’s starting to catch mistakes faster than she used to. I still have that little twist in my gut sometimes, when I see a worksheet with more wrong than right, and I wonder if I should be doing more, getting her a tutor, drilling her extra every night. But I’ve seen this enough now to know that that dip, that feeling that it’s getting worse, isn’t a warning sign. It’s just what learning looks like when you’re actually building something that lasts. It doesn’t feel good right now, and it doesn’t look like progress, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t progress. It just means it’s messy.
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