Perhaps I am dating myself as I often do, but when I was a kid, “do-overs” were a big deal. We begged for them on the playground when a baseball skidded off the bat and veered off into left field, when playing jacks and the tiny ball double bounced, or jumping Double Dutch and missing a jump. We begged for do-overs and were overjoyed when they were granted, and likewise willingly granted do-overs to our friends. On the playground, everyone loved do-overs.
But what about inside the educational space? Within the traditional setting, the phrases “held back” and “grade retention” drip with shame and condemnation, and the social stigma attached to both phrases results in “lower self-esteem and increased anxiety,” according to education professors Laura Link and Diana D’Amico Pawlewicz. The alternative, social promotion, allows students to be promoted alongside their peers regardless of academic performance, which can also have significant drawbacks within a traditional school setting.
As a homeschooler, I have embraced the “do-over” and have experienced its benefits firsthand, both with my own kids and from working with students at eXtend Homeschool Tutorial, the educational collaborative I founded and direct, and where I serve as a math instructor. As homeschoolers, we have the flexibility of targeted do-overs, where repeating a specific class does not mean repeating an entire grade. Instead, do-overs provide an opportunity to strengthen foundational skills. In our program, they have been vital to future success.
I often compare learning to constructing a building: the stronger your foundation, the better it will support the floors above it. Likewise, the stronger a student’s foundational skills are, the better that student will fare when higher-order concepts are layered on. My math classes at eXtend are a great example of this. I teach Saxon Algebra ½, an incremental Pre-Algebra course with concepts systematically building on top of one another….
