Two weeks of doing hard things on Rabbithole

One of our goals at Tradewinds is helping gifted children learn to persevere at something they find genuinely challenging, which requires giving them something hard to do in the first place. In a typical classroom, gifted students spend close to none of the day working at the edge of what they can do. They finish early, they’re right the first time, and they accumulate years of practice at being right and almost no practice at feeling stuck — which, for a lot of them, doesn’t become a problem until college and beyond.

Over the last two weeks, we’ve used Rabbithole, the learning platform we built here, for daily math practice. Here are some stats:

• 3,100 math problems answered, exercising 315 distinct skills
• 78% answered correct on average
  • 39% on first contact with a new skill
  • 90% on fifth contact with the new skill
• 28 times Rabbithole summoned a teacher to support a student who was struggling productively

That 78% is the number to watch. Getting nearly everything right means the work is too easy; 78% means succeeding most of the time while still running into something genuinely beyond you several times a sitting. That’s the zone of proximal development, and for many of these kids it’s something they’ve rarely experienced at school. We built Rabbithole to find a child’s edges and hold them there, regardless of chronological age, which is how one fourth grader spent part of these two weeks on graph theory and Euclid’s algorithm, an eighth-grade topic, while he practiced fluency with subtraction facts within 20.

The same thing happens in humanities discussions. We built Rabbithole to push back rather than agree. After Ms. Spahn’s class spent a week making decisions under a ruler, a council, and majority vote, a fifth grader argued the council was broken because a single holdout had blocked something everyone else wanted. Instead of correcting her, Rabbithole pushed her to consider whether the council was truly broken or working as intended, and how to tell the difference.

In a self-initiated quest about morphemes, another scholar asked: “Where do the dw words come from — dwarf, dweeb, dwindle, Dwayne, Dwight?” She wondered if she could test whether “dw” really signals “small,” went and looked it up, and came back with a counterexample to her own theory: “Dwell is to live and dwelling is a home.”

Two weeks is a small sample and none of this is settled. The real success comes when these students become comfortable sticking with something even after it gets hard, which will be a new experience for many of them. But in the meantime, the kids seem to be loving Rabbithole so much more than I expected!