Picture a junior we’ll call Johnny.
He has never had much trouble in school. He gets A’s, he does his homework, and when his first big physics test came up this fall, he prepared the way he always does. He reread the chapter, redid the homework problems, and made a flashcard for every formula. He got a 68.
His parents did what most parents would do. They decided he needed more practice and found a tutor to walk him through more problems of the same kind. Johnny worked hard for three weeks. His next test came back at 71.
If you’re a counselor, you have probably met a Johnny. If you’re a parent, you may be raising one. The usual response to his situation is more studying, and for a student like Johnny, more studying is the one thing that won’t help.
The diagnosis Johnny never got
Everyone around Johnny, including Johnny, assumed the same thing: a bad grade means he doesn’t know the material well enough. At WCTC, we call that a Fluency problem. It’s the first explanation every strong student reaches for, and sometimes it’s right. For Johnny, it wasn’t, which is why three weeks of extra practice barely moved his score.
At WCTC, we sort what goes wrong for a strong student into three categories. Wes Carroll first laid them out in Unknown Unknowns:
- Fluency: the student “knows the material and how it all interconnects.”
- Presence: the student “is fully focused when engaging with the material.” A student who knows the material but lacks Presence will still get problems wrong by misreading the question, making an arithmetic error, or doing too much in their head. Wes calls this kind of mistake “a forehead-slapper.”
- Boldness: the student “is willing and able to make progress with incomplete information.” People often call this creativity or problem-solving. At its core, it means reasoning well when some pieces of the puzzle seem to be missing.
Most tutoring works on Fluency, because it’s the easiest of the three to see and the easiest to sell. For Johnny, that meant three more weeks of building the one skill he already had.
Why Johnny’s A’s didn’t warn anyone
Here is the part that surprises parents. Johnny’s earlier A’s were real, but they mostly measured Fluency. In many classes, a student can earn an A on Fluency alone, especially with outside help. When the homework looks like the test and a tutor has walked the student through every problem type, nothing requires them to stay fully focused or to reason past a gap. The grade goes up because everyone involved is aiming at the grade.
An A earned that way doesn’t last, and it doesn’t transfer. It holds until the class gets harder, the teacher changes, or the problems stop looking like the ones the student practiced. For Johnny, that moment was junior-year physics, where test problems put familiar ideas into unfamiliar setups. His Fluency hadn’t gone anywhere. The test was finally asking for Presence and Boldness too.
None of this means Johnny was lazy or careless. Nobody had ever shown him that there was more than one kind of mistake. Wes calls gaps like these unknown unknowns: a student can’t fix them because they don’t know they’re there.
The finger and the moon
We’ve made a version of this argument before, in our piece on standing out as a consequence. That piece borrows an image from the Zen poet Ryokan: a finger pointing at the moon. The finger is only there to show you where to look. If you stare at the finger, you miss the moon.
In that piece, college admissions was the finger. Students who build their activities around what they think admissions officers want end up looking like everyone else. Students who follow what actually interests them tend to stand out without trying to.
A grade is a finger too. It points at the skills underneath it. A student who chases the grade can win for a while, by cramming or by leaning on help. A student who builds the skills gets the grade as a consequence, and keeps getting it when the class changes.
How Johnny found his pattern
The first useful thing Johnny did was sort his mistakes. He took his last two physics tests and, for every question he missed or skipped, asked what actually happened:
- If he didn’t understand what the question was asking, or got it wrong again when he redid it, that was Fluency.
- If he knew the material and the method and still made a mistake he would call dumb, that was Presence.
- If he understood the question but couldn’t see how to start, or skipped it out of fear and later found it was easier than it looked, that was Boldness.
The result surprised him. Only a few of his mistakes were Fluency. Several were Presence: a dropped negative sign, a unit he forgot to convert. The biggest group was Boldness. Whenever a problem didn’t look like one he had practiced, he froze or skipped it, even when he knew every idea it required. Extra practice on familiar problems was never going to fix that.
You can try this sort with any student and any recent test. After a few weeks, a pattern usually shows up. Some students are missing one category almost entirely. For others, it changes from subject to subject. Either way, the student now has something more useful to work on than “study more.”
What WCTC builds
The sort shows where the gap is. Closing it is the work we do at WCTC, and we work on all three skills, including the ones a student doesn’t know they’re missing.
At WCTC, we build Fluency by getting the basic ideas of a subject clear enough that they stay. As Wes puts it, anyone can teach you how to think about calculus. We want a student to be able to think in calculus for the rest of their life. Most students who get A’s in calculus can’t do that.
Presence mostly comes down to habits. A WCTC tutor helps a student notice, while it’s happening, what pulls their attention off the problem: rushing, self-talk, the clock. Then we build small, specific habits that guard against it, like checking each line of work before writing the next one and rereading the question before committing to an answer. Once a student can see what’s getting in the way, they can stay focused and, in Wes’s words, “learn like a scholar.”
Boldness is where working one-on-one makes the biggest difference. Teachers have to teach the whole class, so the shortcuts and ways of reasoning that strong students could use rarely get taught. At WCTC, we teach the student in front of us. We give them harder and less familiar problems, let them get stuck, and show them how to make progress anyway. For Johnny, that meant working on unfamiliar physics problems on purpose until starting without a template stopped feeling risky.
To see what this looks like over a full year with a real student, read Naomi’s story. Naomi was a strong AP Calculus BC student whose gap turned out to be Presence. She finished the year with a 5 on the exam and a habit of catching her own mistakes.
Grades as a consequence
When a student builds all three skills, good grades follow, and they keep holding up as classes and teachers change. That is what we mean at WCTC by grades as a consequence of understanding. It’s also why the goal of our tutoring is a student who eventually doesn’t need a tutor.
If you’re a counselor with a student like Johnny, or a parent who senses something is off even when the grades look fine, reach out to WCTC. We’ll start by finding out which of the three is actually missing.
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