Most students don’t fail because they can’t learn.
They fail because they don’t know what to do when learning gets uncomfortable
The Try Cycle™ + The Quit Pit™ is a classroom-born framework that teaches students two critical skills:
1. How to move through failure
2. How to stop quitting too early
Together, they form a simple, visual, behavior-changing system for building persistence, confidence, and real learning.
The idea for The Try Cycle™ was born in an Algebra 3 classroom when I was getting frustrated with students who wouldn’t even attempt a problem unless I told them exactly what to write down
During class one day, I looked out and saw something every teacher has seen: Students sitting in silence. Papers blank. Nobody starting.
When I asked why, the answer was always the same: “I don’t get it.”
But the real issue wasn’t confusion. It was fear.
They were afraid to try because they were afraid to be wrong. So, I drew a circle on the board and wrote four words: TRY, FAIL, CORRECT, SUCCESS.
I told them that in order to learn, they must first do something wrong and then correct their mistake. During that process they would train themselves to do it correctly.
They were confused and said, “That doesn’t make sense, why would I do something wrong because then I am just teaching myself to make mistakes”
They didn’t understand that the process of making mistakes, identifying those mistakes, correcting those mistakes and doing it again was, in fact, the learning process. They were stuck on step one and never made to the end of the cycle.
We eventually changed it to Try → Fail → Fix → Succeed and named it The Try Cycle™
Not every student completed the cycle.
Some would try once, get it wrong, and immediately shut down.
They’d say: “I don’t get it. I give up.”
They weren’t stuck because they were bad at math. They were stuck because they were quitting halfway through the process.
After seeing this pattern over and over, I finally said: “You guys are getting stuck in the Quit Pit.”
They laughed but I wasn’t joking.
The other side of The Try Cycle™, The Quit Pit™, was born.
The Quit Pit™ runs on one dangerous belief:
“If I don’t get it right away, I must be bad at this.”
So instead of fixing mistakes, students:
• avoid trying again
• protect their ego
• scroll their phone
• stop participating
• quit before learning happens
Not because they can’t improve…but because quitting feels safer than failing twice.
Together, they teach students something most adults never learned:
How to keep going when it’s uncomfortable.
