Don't Try to Rescue Your Kid From The 'Learning Pit'

For students, not knowing the right answer is uncomfortable and frustrating. That’s exactly why they need to experience it.

On a winter evening a few years ago, I joined more than a hundred other parents for a meeting at my daughter's school. We watched as an English teacher put up a picture of something called the Learning Pit, which looked like a cartoon ditch with a kid at the bottom.

This, he explained, was the shape that learning takes. The high ground, before the ditch, is the excitement and spark of a new idea. Immediately after comes the false belief that you understand it. Then comes the descent into realizing you don't really understand it: falling into the pit. Over time, very gradually, you figure it out; you climb out of the pit.

This was how the school planned to prepare our 10-year-old children for an upcoming standardized test. They would introduce material far above the kids' abilities, and their grades would be very low. Don't worry about the grades and don't rescue them, the teachers told us. Let them know the goal is not getting the right answer but grappling with the problem. As they wrestled with the work, they would get more comfortable with the discomfort. They would develop strategies to manage it. They would find ways to climb out of the pit. In a word, they would build resilience.