Mulligans and do overs are feel good events. A do over means that a first attempt gone awry does not count – it never happened. One says, “There, that feels better” and progresses to the next opportunity to test one’s skills. When doing a mulligan, one tends to pay more attention, focus on technique, listen to an inner voice of coaching, and the result often improves over the first. But, what about the next “first time”? Will mistakes and learned bad practices surface again? Mulligans and do overs perpetuate mistakes and these will be repeated if the cause for the error is not corrected. Do overs have consequences.
The stand-by example for learned error is usable once again. A child says “five apples” when asked the answer to the question, “How many apples will you have if you have two apples and you find two more apples?” Telling the child to “try again” will not change the conceptual arithmetic error the child made in thinking “five” is the answer. “Try again” only says, “Guess again.” Like the mulligan in golf, the child tees up her brain power and takes another swing at the question guessing “three” as the second answer and another ball slices into the woods. If we do not stop to make a correction in the child’s mental computation, or at least reframe the problem in its components so that the child can conceive of the correct answer, the child will be lost in more “threes” and “fives” for years to come.
One of the hardest things for a teacher to do is to say “Stop. We need to resolve this problem before we do anything else.” Stopping goes against the flow. Stopping requires other children to occupy themselves while the teacher focuses on correcting a problem. Stopping infers that the child with “threes and fives” is a problem. And, the answer to each of the preceding is “yes”. Stopping to correct an error in thinking or judgment or skill execution does mean that the teacher will focus immediate attention on a student or group of students and that all other students will need to work independently until the teacher has corrected the mistake.
Stopping to correct a mistake also is hard because it requires the teacher to have clinical skills in how to focus the student on the error in learning. This begs the question “Does the teacher possess these clinical skills?” Can the teacher identify the critical attributes of the erred learning and isolate the root of the error? Can the teacher use multiple approaches to teach the correction – visuals, manipulatives, models, simulations, as well as verbals? Can the teacher check for understanding at each step to assure correction and repetition to cause retention? Can the teacher use intermittent review to further retention? Can the teacher effectively reinforce the correct learning? These are clinical steps that should be part of initial instruction, but when classmates quickly understand the new instruction it is easy for struggling learners to be left with “threes and fives.” Expediency causes teachers to skip necessary steps in initial instruction that otherwise would promote effective learning by all children.
Stopping to correct mistakes also is a cultural problem. We seem to accept a level of error or mistake in our everyday lives. Recalls and returns to the store are so common that we accept the fact that products may not work as they are designed every time. But, student learning needs to live in a different culture; a culture that does not accept learned errors. Recalls and returns are extremely expensive when applied to human enterprise.
A child who cannot understand that two plus to equals four is destined to make an unbelievable number of future errors in mental calculations. The number of errors will multiply and the complications of these errors will be increase geometrically.
A community culture that favors the achievements of the best and brightest children is destined to spend untold resources in the future to remediate and retrain adults who did not effectively learn when in school. Or, the community will live with adults working in local enterprises who bring their learned errors to work.
An educational culture that accepts that some children will always make calculation errors does not serve its children or its community. Perhaps it is this culture that must be corrected even before the learned mistakes of children are addressed.
Fix the cause of mulligan and stop the perpetuation of a do over mentality.