As usual, let’s look at the saturation provided by the media regarding do-overs throughout the last decade. Celebrated cult movies like Groundhog Day and Sliding Doors follow our protagonists through different choices in virtual, perpetual rewind and repeat. A sci-fi mindbender is Butterfly Effect, starring Ashton Kutcher (fave of the Millennials and husband of Demi Moore, just in case you haven’t kept count, someone herself whose career has experienced its own do-over). The movie follows a college-age hero on his journey to save his sweetheart by going back in time to change his past choices and mistakes. I could make a stretch and list a few more you’ll want to ask your kids about: 50 First Dates, Clean Slate, even Memento. And all of these movies keep one common theme running coursing through their veins: in a modern day nod to the “JR’s not dead, it was just a dream” plot, today we favor a far more convenient way to erase the past: Undo.

An off-shoot of our increasingly commercial – and you’ve heard me say it many times before, disposable – society, the demand for a “do-over” crosses several civilized boundaries and is bleeding into education. Don’t like your cell phone? No problem, go get a new one! Your Second Life avatar a little out of date? Delete! Getting tired of your nose (or hair, lips, tattoo…)? Schedule a make-over with your local plastic surgeon. Need I mention other popular “do-overs” that have become part of the emerging awareness of those 18-24 year olds sitting in your centers, or is the phrase “hanging chads” enough?

It must be wrong. I demand a recount.

Many of us in education have felt the growing pains of being pushed into and through a growing machine of accountability, from NCLB to tightened funding to accreditation boards. Students know this and know their rights, and give as much space to blogging about bad grades as posting homemade music videos. Students (and by necessary extension, their parents) are holding educators increasingly accountable. But the pendulum is resisting swinging both ways; as students hold us more accountable, students are holding themselves less accountable. Or perhaps you might argue that students’ expectations of themselves have not proportionally increased or changed despite the accountability growing around them. They are less willing – or perhaps able – to take responsibility for their actions, for their lack of preparation, for their part in a group. Failed a class? But you have to make an exception for me, because it’s me – and I’ve been special since I was born, and my parents have told me so. (Sidenote: if we didn’t have this kind of “do-over” mentality coupled with weak backbones, we probably wouldn’t have let the helicopter parent phenomenon grow to such extremes in the first place).

So tutoring rides its own slippery slope of sticky situations when students come in expecting answers, depth of knowledge, and B’s and A’s to come to them overnight. Tutoring is an opportunity for the forces of education to lead students back to their own responsibility – not through a forcible test or other form of punishment, rather through patient, personal understanding and questioning. It’s easy to forget that the self-discipline it takes to redirect a question back to a student, rather than answer it, might be hard for us but better for the student. Sometimes we don’t have time for that lesson to take place, for various personal or institutional reasons. But if we don’t take advantage of the opportunity to teach a student to fish, we might find ourselves caught in the perpetual cycle of feeding the masses day after day. Though they might not initially agree or understand, the greater lesson of self-reliance and independent learning doesn’t allow for Get-Out-of-Jail-Free cards by the time the real world hits. And in a world where videogames have a restart button, it may be far more difficult to calculate and anticipate consequences of actions than to admit the game just might be over.

Not that I blame them. Where could they have gotten that idea from?

“It is looking increasingly likely that Democrats in Florida and Michigan are going to have a do-over of their primaries…” - Karen Tumulty, Time Magazine, March 6, 2008 (http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1720264,00.html)

Questions or comments? Contact the author at scibettj@acp.edu.

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