Hard is Good, or to be precise, Good is usually Hard

Many years ago I taught a charming but over-confident student, who was generally not prepared to engage beyond a superficial level, and who nevertheless expected top grades. I treated him fairly, and sought to challenge him - with some limited success as he enjoyed taking things easy, and avoided hard work. His mother was legendarily difficult at teacher-parents meetings, and I approached the meeting with apprehension. It seemed to start off well enough - "Robert has always enjoyed Maths, and always found it so easy" she said, smiling. I smiled back and relaxed, thinking that this was going to go well, and started to say "That's good to hear..." but she dropped the smile and cut me off, and began a long statement saying firmly "Until now, that is..."

Robert's mother and I did come to an understanding, but I have thought about what she said for many years, as a parent and educator. The idea is that thing are going well if they are easy; and the underlying idea is reflected in many idioms - easy on the eye, easy does it, easy pickings and so on.  The converse is even more true - that hard is somehow bad, as implied in phrases like hard luck, be hard pushed, be hard up, hard done by, between a rock and a hard place, fall on hard times, hard feelings, the school of hard knocks, too much like hard work, work smarter not harder.

The most telling phrase is to learn the hard way - which usually means to come face-to-face with the consequences of one's actions; usually mistakes or bad judgements.  The phrase seems to imply that its preferable to avoid this, and to somehow learn without making any mistakes, without the pain of error.  This is a profound mistake, and it is at the root of the frequently expressed anxiety from many students and parents - that when things are hard (ie challenging, stretching, uncomfortable) there is something wrong.   The implication is that the best, most desirable outcome is always to excel with ease.

Now, getting higher grades would, of course, be easy to arrange.  We simply lower the challenge, and award higher grades generally.  But good schools are not about grades; they are about preparing students for a lifetime of continual change, and about nurturing people of character who do not shy away from the hard stuff.

Educational guru John Hattie nailed it when he said the teachers job is not to make work easy. It is to make it difficult. If you're not challenged, you do not make mistakes. If you do not make mistakes, feedback is useless.  And as feedback is key to learning, this point is at the heart of what makes a good school. 

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The problem is that it's easy to feel that we are not learning when we are, and to mistake subjective discomfort for lack of progress.  That goes hand in hand with mistaking comfort for progress.   That this happens is a very, very well established scientific finding, and we can probably all relate to this example (from Bjork and Bjork, in a 2011 paper):

• Re-reading a chapter, or reviewing notes, gives a sense of comfort that we interpret as understanding or comprehension, but may actually be a product of recognition and not aid learning at all. 
• Difficulty in recalling notes as we re-write them gives a sense of discomfort that we interpret to mean that we are not making any progress, despite the fact that we know that 'effortful recall' is a far more reliable way to develop recall and deepen understanding.

There are whole range of other counter-intuitive examples here.  

• We find it easier to study in a particular environment; but that often seems to be a product of cues that are present in that one situation, which are unlikely to be present at a later time (e.g. access to resources, familiarity and comfort, relaxed mood).  So the comfort may actually prevent us from applying the learning elsewhere, in different contexts where it is needed. 
• We find it easier when we learn in a blocked way (ie learn a topic, move to another, move to another) rather than in an interleaved way (where topics are carefully mixed). The comfort of seeing the organisation can prevent us from deeply engaging to work it out for ourselves.  Evidence that our subjective impression wrongly favours blocked learning is well know - see for example this evidence from Bjork and Bjork:

That's not to say we should ignore students who find work difficult and who are struggling.  Subjective experience matters - if a student is demotivated by subjective difficulty then that's critical.  But nor can we simply rely on subjective impression, any more than we would in assessing any other area of performance.   As always, what's needed is the artistry of the teacher, who knows the student, the material, and the dynamic in the class.   Going back to that parent all those years ago - I was not fully able to convince Robert's mother about this; and I sometimes find myself in the same position today. 

I have been talking about academics, but in truth, the idea that we shy away from hard and move to easy is hardly a subtle one.  It's likely true in doing most things of any value; in politics; in science; in the arts; in our exercise routines; in our diets; in our relationships... almost anywhere.  It's why character and resilience are as or more important than almost anything else, and why chasing grades is such a chimera.  The spur for this piece came from  blogger Scott Alexander's brilliant one-liner: All good is hard. All evil is easy..... losing, cheating and mediocrity is easy. Stay away from easy. 

References

• Bjork, E. and Bjork, R. (2011). Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: Creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning. Psychology and the Real World: Essays Illustrating Fundamental Contributions to Society. 56-64.
• Soderstrom, N (2019) Learning vs. Performance: A Distinction Every Educator Should Know. Medium