Why We Need to Ask: Are We Educating Kids or Training Them for the System?
The worksheet had thirty-two subtraction problems on it. I remember this distinctly because it was a Tuesday, and Tuesdays in my classroom have always been about getting through the math curriculum. One of my students, a quiet girl named Amal, had her pencil hovering over the third row. She was stuck on a problem that required borrowing from the tens column. I knelt down beside her desk, which was still covered in glitter from the morning’s art project, and asked her what she was thinking.
“I know the answer is twelve,” she said, pointing at the numbers. “But I don’t know how to show the borrowing.”
This is the moment I keep coming back to. Amal understood the math. She could see the quantity, she could manipulate the numbers in her head, and she had arrived at a correct answer. But she was frozen because the specific procedure we had drilled the day before—crossing out the three, putting a little two above it, carrying the one—wasn’t clicking for her. She was failing at the system’s visual shorthand, not at the actual learning.
We spend a lot of time in education talking about rigor and standards. We talk about preparing children for the next grade, for high school, for college, for the workforce. But sitting there on that glitter-covered floor, I had to ask myself a very uncomfortable question: Was I educating Amal, or was I just trying to get her through a checklist?
The pressure is real. It doesn’t come from one place; it seeps in from everywhere. The pacing guide says we need to finish fractions by the end of the month. The benchmark test in the spring will specifically assess the standard “3.NBT.2.” The parent-teacher conference is coming up, and I know another teacher down the hall has already covered two more chapters than I have. That pressure is a physical thing. It lives in the stack of ungraded papers on my desk and in the tightness I feel when I see a student like Amal falling behind the schedule.
In that moment, with Amal waiting for my verdict, I had to make a split-second choice. I could insist on the borrowing algorithm because the test next week is going to look for that exact notation. Or I could validate her thinking and risk the fact that she might not pass the procedural fluency check on Friday.
I chose the latter. I told her, “You’re right. It is twelve. Can you show me your thinking with the base-ten blocks instead?” She got up, grabbed the little plastic cubes from the bin, and showed me how she broke the thirty-two into three tens and two ones, then took eight from the tens bundle. It was correct. It was flexible. It was beautiful.
But later that afternoon, during my planning period, I entered a “not mastered” next to her name on the tracking sheet for the standard “use standard algorithm for subtraction.” Because that is what the system requires.
This tension isn’t confined to the classroom. I see it in parents, too—the worry when a kid brings home a B in reading because they struggled with a comprehension worksheet, even though they just built a complex LEGO spaceship based on a book they read independently. I see it in the push to get kids into “advanced” math tracks before they’ve even learned to love numbers. We are desperate to ensure our kids don’t fall through the cracks, but we’ve gotten so obsessed with the cracks we’re staring at that we forget to watch the path.
So what do we do about it? I don’t have a revolutionary answer, but I’ve started to make small adjustments in my own practice, and I’ve shared these with the parents in my room. Maybe they resonate with you.
First, I’ve started to look for the thought behind the wrong answer. This sounds soft, but it’s actually quite clinical. When a kid gets a problem wrong, I don’t just look at the final number. I look at the work. Did they make a computational error (like 8+7=16), or did they misapply a concept (like adding the denominator)? If it’s a computational slip, that’s often just fatigue; we move on. If it’s a conceptual issue, that’s where the real teaching happens.
Second, I’ve become a big fan of the “wrong answer” prompt. If a child solves 5 x 3 and gets 15, I ask them to explain how they got it. If they get 8, I ask them to explain that. The child who gets the right answer but can’t explain the process is just following a rote pattern. The child who gets the wrong answer but can explain their logic is showing me where their thinking has a flaw, and that is the most valuable information I can get.
Third, I’ve started to introduce what I call “process-based” projects more often. This is the messy stuff. For example, instead of a spelling test on Friday, I asked the kids to create a “word map” for their spelling words—linking each word to a synonym, a feeling, and a tiny drawing. The test checks if they can memorize letter order for a day. The word map checks if they actually know what the word means. The system loves the test because it produces a neat, quantifiable data point. But humans, especially little ones, are not neat data points.
I also tell parents to fight the urge to “help” too much with homework. The syllabus I send home at the start of the year has a specific line: “If your child is stuck on a problem for more than ten minutes, write the word ‘stuck’ with an arrow pointing to the question and send it back. Do not provide the answer.” This is hard for parents, I know. You see your kid frustrated, and you want to fix it. But if you rescue them, they never develop the stamina to sit with uncertainty. The goal isn’t a perfect homework paper. The goal is the neural pathway built by struggling, thinking, and trying—even if the answer ends up wrong.
In the classroom, this also means I’ve had to get okay with a “noisier” environment. Learning is loud. When kids are solving problems in their own way, they’re talking, pointing, arguing. It looks chaotic. It looks like they aren’t “on task.” But when I sat with Amal and the base-ten blocks, she was using the language of mathematics. She was articulating her reasoning.
The catch is that the report card doesn’t have a box for “articulates reasoning well.” The report card has boxes for “completes homework” and “knows standard algorithm.” So, I am still torn. I still make the kids take the timed fluency tests, because I know the system rewards speed and automaticity, and those things do matter. But how we get there is changing.
The other day, I watched Amal solve a multi-step word problem about a school fair. She didn’t use the standard algorithm. She drew a picture of a hot dog stand and used tally marks to keep her place. On the state test, this would be inefficient. In the real world, this is problem-solving. I gave her full credit, and I wrote a little note on the paper: “Great flexible thinking, Amal.” She smiled.
I don’t know if that’s enough. I don’t think we are going to abolish grading or standardized tests anytime soon. But I do know this: if we don’t start paying attention to how our children think, not just that they think, we are going to raise a generation of highly compliant rule-followers who have no idea what to do when the rules run out.
The system is a tool, not a destination. It’s still sitting on my desk, the pacing guide. The exact dates for the units are printed in black ink. I glance at it sometimes, feel a familiar pang of anxiety about falling behind, and then I put it away. I’d rather have a classroom full of kids who can explain a messy, wrong answer than a silent room of kids who can fill in the bubbles correctly and hate every second of it.
The tension is still there, every day. But I think that’s the job. Not to resolve it, but to keep asking the question.
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