Teaching Friction
Productive struggle creates the best learning. Friction, challenge, rigor, desirable difficulties, whatever name it goes by, it is well understood that this curated resistance is what leads to growth. This is pretty much universally understood in regards to fitness; there's nuance to "no pain, no gain" but we know that we have to push our bodies to get them to improve. The brain isn't a muscle but a similar logic should apply, we all have an anecdote to reinforce that.
As a teacher, then, I should be curating these challenges for my students. But it feels like the resources and training I receive push against this. In curriculum there is a drive to make content accessible, with increasingly abridged texts and excessive abstraction. A bad teacher would be a gatekeeper to information. The trendiest tech generatively repackages content and gives students an algorithmic grace on their attempts faster than the most sympathetic instructor ever could. The resources we get take the mantra of "meet students where they are" to heart too literally. I want to meet them a little bit beyond.
This comes naturally when coaching, or even just working out with friends. It seems instinctual to push each other for one more rep, one more lap. We log our runs to set new baselines or to challenge ourselves to new levels of consistency and discipline. So my real role as a teacher should be to bring this energy to the classroom. But what does it mean to do one more rep of Calculus? Another lap of kinematics?
My current strategy for this is to deliberately remove structure from assignments while still setting clear endpoints for the finished work. Here's a box of craft supplies, make me a balloon car. Here's a checklist of functions, make me some art in Desmos. The students are no longer just following a recipe, they are building resilience instead of just muscle memory. This structure used to be even more powerful before the internet was flooded with generative AI. I could have students warm up for a class by discovering totally new concepts and all I would need to do is push them for more rigor and clarity. You shouldn't trust anything you see online without some level of verification, but the proliferation of inaccuracies has slowed down that process where an open-ended research task can now eat up entire class periods due to the hunt for veracity.
I do not want to meet students where they are. I want to find where they are and give them new goalposts a few steps away. And with the kindest cruelty I want to keep pushing those targets farther and farther away as they approach. This is exhausting, for everyone involved. It's hard work, and that's exactly why it is worth doing.