It's Not Cheating
It’s Not Cheating (And Neither Is Getting Help) By Kristi Cruise For the last week Nate has been failing at some geometry concepts. Literally. 40%. Big fat F. And more than the math, he was collapsing inside himself. You could see it in his shoulders, in his confidence. It's crushing as a mother to watch your children suffer in this way. We sat down together last night for about an hour and a half. An hour and a half of 30-60-90 triangles and square roots and formulas I haven’t touched in over thirty years. It was work. For him. For me. At first, his nervous system was lit up. Fast breathing. Tight jaw. That glassy “I’m bad at this” look. And here’s the thing we don’t talk about enough: Most academic struggle isn’t intellectual. It’s physiological. When the body feels unsafe, the brain goes offline. So before we even mastered the math, we had to settle the body. We slowed down. We did the steps slowly. We repeated them. Repetition is regulation. Somethi...