When a student is working online, remotely, we don’t measure their progress the same way we would in the classroom.

Learning to do online school (or remote work) requires a person to learn to stick to one tab at a time, wean oneself off of continuous notifications, and demonstrate evidence of actual work being done. The person has to practice reaching out for help and feedback instead of waiting passively.

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It’s fashionable now, among progressive educators, to speak about teaching entrepreneurship.

What most of these folks are actually doing is teaching small business ownership. However admirable that may be, it is not the same thing.

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Among Adam Sandler’s oeuvre of silly movies, there’s one, Billy Madison, in which Sandler plays a man who must go back to school and quickly progress through all of the grades, starting with kindergarten.

Though the premise is absurd, I find myself thinking of it often as I support my students in doing something similar, particularly in math.

Too many students were pushed too far, too fast in the first place, leaving them with an uncertain foundation. Because this is the only reality they’ve ever known, they don’t even realize that their lack of foundation is the problem — they assume that they are just unintelligent. In order to solve the problem, we must, like Billy Madison, go all the way back to kindergarten and reestablish the basics, progressing much more quickly through the material than a small child would.

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Many of the students we work with at The Little Middle School and Rulerless Academy are seeking refuge from unhappy learning experiences.

Our job is to help them find satisfaction in learning again.

So many students have come to believe that being wrong is dangerous, asking for help is unwelcome, and that no matter how hard they try, they still won’t be good enough. It’s hard for them to trust their teachers, having been stung by indifference, hostility, or inconsistency in the past.

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This was a sentiment I had heard many times from adult students. Coming from a fifty-year-old with a demanding job and family obligations, it had a veneer of validity. I had often had a similar thought myself, as I compared my career to those of the people I aspired to be like.

However, hearing the same exact words from a small child caused me to question my beliefs. His words confirmed for me that the concern about running out of time and falling behind is driven by fear, not reality.

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