How the Backwards Brain Bicycle Affects Your Home School

Too cool, right?

This is why it is so important that we “learn” concepts correctly the first time so we don’t waste time “unlearning”. One of the greatest benefits of homeschooling is the ability to more easily gauge learner comprehension throughout the lesson for this very reason.

Before I began my homeschooling journey, I was a special education teacher.  One of the most frustrating parts of teaching special education was troubleshooting to try to figure out why a learner was getting something wrong so we could then go through the process of unlearning the incorrect way and relearning the skill correctly. Once a learner has learned a skill incorrectly, it really is like learning to ride a backwards bike to learn to do the skill correctly.

Specifically, I had a student who consistently missed all one-digit subtraction problems by one.  After watching her carefully and having her talk through how she was doing her subtraction, I discovered that she was counting up from the lower number to the higher number.  This can be effective as long as she remembers not to count the lower number, but she was doing just that.  I taught her to “punch” the lower number to remember to start counting up from the next number.  It was a simple fix, but it took a lot more repetition to get the skill down than it would have if she had learned to subtract correctly from the beginning.

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