The Last Thing Your Kid Needs Is To Take Another Class

You've been presented with a choice of activities for your kid: a structured, highly organized class designed to teach them some specific skill, or a vague one-on-two-or-three apprenticeship/mentorship experience shaped by the intersection of your kid's interests and needs and real-world projects. Which do you choose?

I'm guessing you probably choose the class, as has pretty much every other parent that I've presented these choices to. It's easier to understand, it's more familiar, and it feels... safer. All of these other parents are signing their kids up for it too, so it must be the right choice, right?

This has been a little bit of a thing forever, then it really ramped up post-COVID, and it's still going strong now . We've got a bunch of very bright, very capable, very motivated kids who want to do good work - but they seem to have a mental block that stops them from actually doing much of anything. I'm a firm believer that every kid needs to be on a FIRST team or something like it because of the opportunities that experience provides, but so many of the kids that we see are fundamentally unprepared and unable to take advantage of those opportunities.

A lot of parents see this and are worried about their kids' futures, too. So what are they doing about it? They've been signing their kids up for more classes. More adult-driven after-school activities. More structured skill-building workshops. Something that ends with a sense of completion, accomplishment, and maybe some sort of tangible credential or "proof" of learning. Embracing liminoid experiences that provide shallow engagement over truly transformative liminal ones. More and more and more opportunities for their kids to be "productive" and "engaged" and "learning something useful."

And the result? Kids that have been denied the opportunity to explore, to fail, to struggle, and to develop a sense of agency and autonomy. Kids that have been trained to ignore what they want and what they need in favor of doing what they're told. Kids who struggle to figure out who they are and what they want to do with their lives. Kids who are burned out, disengaged, disinterested, and unmotivated. Kids that grow up to be leaders that can't lead, managers who won't stand up for their employees or their work when it matters, and employees that can't function without constant supervision and direction.

Here's the thing: people, especially kids, are all fundamentally different. They learn in different ways, at different paces, and have different interests, strengths, and needs. Some kids thrive in structured, group environments, while others need more individualized attention and support. Some kids need to move quickly and take on new challenges, while others need more time to process and reflect. Some kids are naturally curious and self-motivated, while others need more guidance and encouragement. Some kids could thrive in a given structured group setting, but they don't have the background knowledge, maturity, social skills, psychological stability, or confidence to do so yet. Some kids fit one of those profiles on one day and a completely different one the next. Trying to fit all of these kids into the same mold of structured classes and activities means nobody really gets what they need - at best, the kids closest to the profile that the program is designed for get what the program intends, which hopefully is what they were looking for.

And not only that, but they don't learn nearly as well in these structured group environments, either. Dr. Benjamin Bloom showed that responsive, mastery-style, one-on-one tutoring is the most effective way to learn something new back in the '80s. And yet, we generally refer to this research as the "two sigma problem" instead of the "two sigma solution" because all of the follow-up work has been on trying to replicate the results without the resources that make those results possible. In a typical class-type structure, the teacher needs to keep a certain pace in order to cover all of the material, which means that the faster students are bored and disengaged, while the slower students are left behind and frustrated because the instructor can't give them the attention they need. In a one-on-one or one-on-small-group mentorship/apprenticeship-type operation, the mentor can do a lot more to tailor each kid's experience to what they actually need. Working in this model, the kids are also way more likely to be working on projects that are meaningful and relevant to them and their community, which helps them stay engaged and motivated as well.

Over the years I've heard from several of our robotics parents that we should offer more structured classes to help build interest & engagement in our programs. And we always have parents who think they're signing their kids up for a some highly structured, adult-driven program where we just step the kids through a pre-planned curriculum and learn how to build a robot or whatever. But that's not what we do. That's not what we want to do. We're all professionals in our respective fields, and we know that's not what these kids need to be successful & live meaningful, fulfilling lives down the road. And it's not just us. I've had engineering faculty tell me that they can always tell which students came through programs like ours because those students are so much better prepared to do real engineering work than their peers. They wish they could get their senior design students to work at the level that our 13 and 14-year-olds do. We all work with too many people that are, at best, only as good as the processes and structures that they were trained to follow, and at worst are completely incapable of functioning without constant supervision and direction. That's not good for anybody, and we believe that not only are most people capable of so much more than that, but that they deserve to be able to do more than that. They just need the resources, support, and freedom to do so - so that's exactly what we try to provide. Yes, it's harder, messier, and more complicated than just running nothing but straightforward, pre-planned lessons. But it's also way more effective, way more engaging, and way more meaningful for everyone involved.

So yeah, the last thing your kid probably needs is to take another class. Give them time, space, and support to figure out who they are and what they want to do with their lives instead.