Why I stopped timing her

10 August 2026 · by Larry

For a while I timed her. Not in a stopwatch-on-the-table way — I just started saying things like "let's see how many you can do in five minutes." It felt harmless. Fast looked like good.

Then one evening I watched her more carefully than usual, and what I saw changed my mind.

What the clock was actually teaching

She got to a question she wasn't sure about — one of the ones where you have to stop and think for a second. And she guessed. Not because she couldn't do it. Because stopping would cost her time, and time was the thing I had told her mattered.

That is the bit that stayed with me. I hadn't meant to teach her anything about guessing. But if you reward speed, a child learns very quickly that the cheapest way to be fast is to stop checking.

The moment she doesn't know something is the whole point of the exercise. A timer teaches her to skip past it.

Where I think the timing idea comes from

I don't think I invented it. Speed is easy to see. You can watch a child do twenty sums in three minutes and feel something. You cannot watch understanding in the same way — it looks like a child sitting there, apparently doing nothing.

And there is a grain of truth underneath it. Fluency does matter. A child who has to rebuild seven plus eight from scratch every single time has less room in her head for the actual problem in front of her. But that fluency is the result of understanding something well enough that it becomes automatic. It is not produced by hurrying a child who hasn't got there yet.

So the order matters. Understand it, use it enough that it becomes quick, and the speed arrives on its own. Chase the speed first and you get a child who is fast at guessing.

What I do now instead

Three small changes, none of them clever.

I ask how, not how many. "How did you get that?" is a better question than "how many did you finish?" — and it works just as well when the answer is right, which is when children least expect to be asked.
I let the pause happen. When she goes quiet on a question, I say nothing. It is genuinely uncomfortable for about four seconds. That silence is her doing the work.
I praise the noticing. When she catches her own mistake before I do, that is the thing I make a fuss about — more than a correct answer, which she might have got either way.

What this changed in the site

StudyLab has never had a countdown on the maths practice, and it is not going to get one. Nothing counts down, nothing flashes when you are slow, and no score is calculated against a clock. The streak and the stars are about coming back, not about being quick.

The block puzzle is a game and games can be fast — that's fine, it is a different thing. But the practice side is deliberately unhurried. When a child picks a wrong answer there, the wrong answers are not random: each one is a real mistake children actually make, so a wrong choice quietly points at which idea hasn't clicked yet. That only works if she is thinking rather than racing.

The honest limit

I should say the obvious thing: at some point she will sit a paper with a time limit on it, and being slow will cost her. I am not pretending otherwise.

But I don't think the answer is to practise being rushed. It is to make the understanding solid enough that the speed comes free. Rushing a child who doesn't yet understand doesn't make her faster. It just makes her quieter about the parts she doesn't know — and those are exactly the parts I need her to tell me about.

— Larry

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