The term unforced errors was first coined in 1982 by former tennis player turned sports statistician, Leo Lavin to describe an error in a service or return shot that can only be attributed to lack of skill or poor judgment or execution in the game of tennis. I think of this often as I see televised debates on the state of education in the U.S. or as I speak with teachers and parents.

Recently, after noticing a downward trend in my daughter’s 8th grade math scores, I got involved to see if I could work with her and her teacher to get her back on track. At the outset I must say that her school has a great academic rating and is one of the better schools in the county. I exchanged a few emails with the teacher who said that my daughter needed to practice more at home since he suspected that due to the late period of the class some students were not as alert as they should be. However, listening to my daughter explain the way the teacher conducts class it is clear to me that many teachers simply gravitate to the brightest kids. This may be in part human nature, but I can see how average kids can be shortchanged. If parents aren’t holding both kids and teachers to a higher standard the kids ultimately lose.

It is a fact that there are few geniuses among us and that most of us who become proficient at anything need to work 20 times harder. This is true for science, business, carpentry or basketball and applies to learning as well. I suspect that with a new commitment to rigor on the part of school systems we can take the 80 percent of average students and turn them into stars. I submit that teachers who don’t believe this should be encouraged to find a new line of work and that parents of kids who get lower than a B in any subject should be part of a formal solution for getting the child back on track academically. Let’s face it, kids today have memorized several dozen CDs worth of pop song lyrics which they recite flawlessly. Why then do tolerate the use of calculators as a substitute for simple times tables and estimation? Are we training future adults who would be unable to mentally compute a 10 percent discount on sale day?

With every discipline there are times when you really need to put on your thinking cap and figure out a solution to a problem. However, there are some standard scenarios that a competent person in that discipline needs to immediately recognize as rudimentary and foundational. When we fail to identify these basic scenarios and botch the execution this is in effect what Leo Lavin calls “unforced errors”. Mr. Lavin took it one step further and improved the performance of many athletes and teams by statistically analyzing errors categories.

In the popular culture there is also the notion that being honest with kids about their lack of performance ruins their self-esteem. If pride and confidence comes from mastery, what do we say to the students who display little mastery but demand accolades? Are we doing them a favor by shielding them from the truth? I say we demand better performance and provide by way of tools, not only the “hows” but the “whys” of getting there.

To address the “hows” with my daughter I performed an assessment to identify weak areas in addition to together reading ahead to upcoming topics. In each weak area she worked on a few dozen representative problems and solved the same set of problems each night for 3 nights in a row. For the “whys” I pointed out that the only way she will be able to travel and see the world as an adult is if she got her grades up, gained her confidence and got out of her own way. I am pleased to say that recently I have detected a new confidence in my daughter that I haven’t seen in the math department for some time.