From the archive: On [not] getting to Carnegie Hall

Why do Americans find practice in sports and music heroic, and practicing academics traumatic?

Happy Friday, Bell Ringers! Due to some unforeseen circumstances, what was going to be today’s newsletter had to be moved to next week. But never fear: next week’s going to be spectacular. So here’s a freebie today from the archive, an essay where I’m trying to work out why our culture admires practice in sports or music but is skeptical when it comes to practicing academics. Practice will come up again in next week’s newsletters, so it’s a good think to think about.

If you haven’t yet, if you’re an educator consider contributing to Tuesday’s open thread on what you learned in teacher training. You can leave a comment or email me directly if you’d like to share your experience. There will be more to come on this one as well, so stay tuned—HMK

I think about practice a lot; it’s one of my reporting obsessions. Maybe it’s because I am not a natural at anything I care about doing well. Years ago, when I was a singer and dancer in New York City, I wasn’t one of those cool actors who could pick up a scene or a song in a few tries and make it look polished and effortless. In fact, my scenes and auditions were sweated over. To be good—to be good as I wanted to be—I had to try really hard. I practiced a lot, much of it outside of a regular rehearsal, in my tiny one-bedroom Queens apartment, to my roommate’s chagrin. 

And now in my life as a writer? Same. Maybe worse. 

I bring up practice on this Good Friday because lack of practice in academic skills is one of the biggest obstacles to academic achievement, and maybe one of the easiest things to fix. 

I happened to say something about practice on the Centering the Pendulum podcast last week. I recently reported a story about how students don’t get enough practice in math to get proficient at it—I spoke to many parents, teachers, and researchers in k-12, and they all agree this is a huge problem—and it’s affecting their long-term achievement.

On the podcast I compared math practice to sports, and made a comment that if we here in the SEC (I live in Nashville) practiced football the way schools practiced math, we wouldn’t be champions. (Please don’t email me, I know we weren’t champions this year, but we are known for being good at football. Just go with it.) Lack of practice would be terrible for football teams because they need a lot of practice to be good at the game. Inherent in my comment is that kids also need a lot of practice in math in order to be good at it. How do we think that lack of math practice is working out for kids? (Let me tell you: not well.) 

Some educators had a lot of problems with me comparing math practice to football practice—some quite literally said that “practice wouldn’t help” get more kids to higher math. They said the comparison is dumb because 1. football and math are not the same (true); 2. kids WANT to play football but not do math (also true); 3. football is a kind of performance and school is not (ok, mostly true). The reason I compared them is because I’m fascinated by how differently our culture values practice in the two domains. The kind of grit it takes to push through a tough football practice we find heroic, and a testament to a kid’s character. But a tough math practice, many believe, whatever that might look like, would be harmful to kids emotionally and would hurt their learning. 

I’m not advocating for kids to put on pads and start doing drills with times tables. I’m talking about two things: Why do we give kids so many more opportunities to practice the skills of football (or cello or choir or soccer) than academic skills? And why do adults quite clearly value these two kinds of practice differently, and does anyone think this switch in values is not getting transmitted to kids? 

I’m not picking on these teachers—who admittedly may never leave me alone for comparing math practice to football practice—but to highlight how this thinking distorts the education kids are getting. A good chunk of kids need a lot more practice getting good at academic skills. The repetition of practice helps solidify what kids have learned into long-term memory, and importantly: some kids need more practice than others. For example, cognitive scientists told me that half of all students will need explicit teaching and practice in phonics to be able to catch on to reading words. Out of that 50%, 20% of those kids will need a lot of practice.  

Some reasons why kids don’t get enough practice in school make sense, as educators have explained to me: there are so many standards, it’s difficult for teachers to be able to give proper practice in each one. The curriculum is too stuffed and they have to cover way too much, and if teachers have a class of students who need lots of extra practice, it’s even harder. 

Some schools also struggle to help the kids who need lots of extra practice. They don’t have a plan, or have enough staff.

But fitting in enough practice can even be hard when the kids can move more quickly. One middle school math teacher who taught honors students put it to me this way: his kids had the capacity to do the work, but “only my very brightest students can move at the pace we are supposed to move and be able to get it all.” Even his honors students needed more practice.

There’s also a pretty widespread belief that too much practice, the kind of boring stuff where you have to diagram 20 sentences a night, might turn kids off to academic subjects, the math and history and English they already don’t want to do and teachers find difficult to get kids to do. This is the definition of drill and kill—as in drill the practice, kill the love of learning. Learning should be fun, this thinking goes, and kids are much more likely to like reading or like geometry if they’re having fun with it. If they’re engaged.

One strain of this idea is quite worried that practicing certain subjects like math, under certain conditions, causes anxiety and even trauma, most often math and timed math tests for young kids. This is a complex area that will take an entire newsletter to dissect, but lots of educators have very strong feelings about this kind of practice. 

You might have heard related ideas that modern schools are based on the factory model, and that they kill creativity. This idea has been hugely influential on American kids and schools. Many American parents want more than anything for their kids to be innovators, boundary-pushers and creative thinkers—a just-right blend of Mark Zuckerberg, Frida Kahlo, and LeBron James. And many believe it’s hurting their kids’ chances at this kind of genius-level creativity if they’re slogging away at worksheets of long division.

But research indicates that when students don’t know the nuts and bolts of whatever subject they’re working on, the basic building blocks, it’s much harder to become successful at it, much less genius-level. Building a store of background knowledge in any subject is the basic building block for developing innovative or creative ideas in that subject. And building those blocks can sometimes mean some un-fun practice. 

There’s also fascinating research suggesting that kids are more motivated when they are successful at the material, not the other way around.

Would kids look at academic practice differently not if we made it more like football practice, but what if we talked about it more like football practice? Because adults are quite impressed when kids use their grit to practice a sport, an instrument or a musical with dedication and determination. It’s not necessarily about the practice itself; it’s about character-building. But academic practice is seen as anxiety-producing, harmful, and not character-building. We don’t connect it in the same way to grit and results. 

Like this (hat tip to educator Zach Groshell): 

Football practice: It’s incredible how you pushed through that difficult practice! Like Malcolm Gladwell says, 10,000 hours, baby! All this hard work is not just making you a better football player, it’s building your character. These are lessons you will use throughout your life! 

Math facts practice: Jeez, are you still working on those problems? This is a crazy amount of work, you need to get outside and play, get some fresh air! 

We send conflicting messages to kids about the value of practice depending on what it is. 

Are there unhelpful kinds of practice? Absolutely. I wrote about a trend ten years ago in which preschools sent home worksheets for four-year-olds to get a “little extra practice.” I once witnessed a lacrosse coach have middle schoolers do “army crawls” across a muddy field. Lacrosse doesn’t involve any crawling—ever—and of course the kids were quite confused as to why they were doing it, and not very motivated to do it. 

There is such a thing as bad practice—practice that has no point, or doesn’t build toward a goal and larger set of skills, or that is humiliating to kids in a variety of ways. (This upsets me in sports so much, I went out and wrote specifically about a coach training program here in Nashville that helps coaches work on their social-emotional skills and build good relationships with kids). I am not suggesting that practice be upheld in all ways, at all costs, with no purpose. 

But many schools have gone too far in the opposite direction. It’s an important reminder that anything we want to get good at, we should practice. 

Some kids go and get the extra practice they need, if they have the means. Wealthier kids’ parents pay for extra practice when students can’t catch on to reading or math or writing papers, because that’s what tutoring is: extra practice with feedback from an expert. 

For the kids who need the practice but are not wealthy: they often do not do well in school. It doesn’t just boil down to practice, of course. But it does surprise me to stand on the sidelines and watch some of these kids on the field, on the court, on the diamond, performing incredibly well. They have clearly put in the time to be excellent—but they are struggling in school. 

They understand what it means to practice. If only they got enough in school to succeed. 

* I’m going to keep writing about practice, and would love to hear your thoughts: are your kids getting enough? As an educator, have you found ways to work in more practice? As a parent, has lack of practice been an issue for your kids? 

Leave a comment or send me a message at holly@hollykorbey.com.