Sliders vs. Toggles

We are ruining our world and ourselves by insisting that important issues are toggle switches instead of slide switches.

You know the difference. A toggle switch has a limited number of settings—on and off, 0 or 1. A slider can be moved across a span between two extremes, and can include many states between. Toggle-thinking allows for only two static states: it’s A or B; it’s black or white. Slider-thinking allows for a spectrum of states: it’s anywhere from A through Z; it’s black, white, or many shades of grey.

For any political or cultural issue, there are surely A and Z positions, and people who hold them. But there are millions of people who hold hundreds of views between those extremes, and their voices are effectively shut out of the discourse, because winning an argument is now more important than solving a problem, and A is a stronger argument against Z then W is.

But most of us live in the in-between, and we need to reclaim that space, because it’s where problems are actually solved. And more importantly, it’s where people find it possible to live together.

I’m a liberal. I like reading and having conversations with conservatives, to learn how they see the country and the world. I like having my opinions tested against other perspectives. But real dialogue is only possible when both parties acknowledge and accept that the issue at hand is actually represented by the full spectrum of opinions, not one extreme or the other. Pro-Life and Pro-Choice are ridiculous team names. Everyone in the country is pro-life, generally, and also pro-choice, generally. Most people (not everyone) are also pro-both-sides on the specific issue of abortion, to varying degrees. Acknowledging that the spectrum is real and valid is the beginning of real discourse. Exploring where we all set our slider-switches is how we begin to craft compromise and, ultimately, policy.

If you believe that the rights of the individual are supreme, sacred, and inviolable—that all government is evil, that all taxation is theft, and that no individual can be compelled to shape or change his behavior or choices to accommodate any other individual, well…there’s no discussion possible. If you believe that the health and vibrancy of the community or the state is supreme and that what’s good for the group outweighs what’s good for the individual—all the time, in all cases—there is likewise no room for discussion. And some people do hold those extreme positions. I find them scary people. They only see true believers and apostates, the forces of God and the legions of Satan. The only resolution to the problem of different opinions is cultural—or actual—war, and the obliteration of the Enemy.

For most of us, it’s the spectrum that’s real—the dynamic tension of opposite positions, each of which has merit and both of which need to be “in play” to some extent in order for us to be happy and healthy. Now we can talk. Now we can argue about where on the spectrum we should draw the line between individual rights and public life (for example). We can say, “Yes, a business owner should have the right to offer the products and services that she wants, the way she wants, BUT a citizen should also have the right to purchase products and services on the open market, in the public square, regardless of race, religion, gender, or any other personal detail. Now what are we going to do about it?”

I’m tired of us not being able to get to, “What are we going to do about it,” and I’m tired of pretending that this inability is accidental or fated. It’s neither. Our inability to talk to each other and solve problems is deliberate and planned. We are placed and kept at each other’s throats to build and maintain the power and wealth of those who represent the extreme positions—many of whom don’t even believe in those positions but have found it profitable and advantageous to hold them.

The spectrum is messy and confusing. It requires argument. It requires understanding. It requires shoving the slider a little more this way, a little more that way, till you get the setting just right. Choosing A or Z is a lot easier. Hating Z because you’re at A is also a lot easier.

But none of this was meant to be easy.

Who Needs Teachers? Your Textbooks Do

It used to be fashionable to talk about how technology was going to solve all of our educational equity and excellence problems—bringing relevant, high-quality content to all students, scaffolding instruction to meet each student where he or she was, and engaging every student in meaningful learning, even if that student didn’t have access to excellent teachers…or any teachers. Maybe teachers weren’t necessary anymore, we argued. After all, students can reach out to Wikipedia and YouTube and online calculators and so on, to get any bit of information they might need. They can teach themselves! And, with new national standards, everyone will be learning the same things at the same pace, so…problem solved.

Ha, ha! Obviously, none of this has come to pass. Perhaps less obviously, none of it even made sense.

With learning standards stuffed with more content than could ever be taught in 20 years, much less the 12 we’re given, and standardized tests focused on the low-DOK, low-Bloom levels of thinking that computers can easily score, perhaps it was easy for some of us to think that the primary role of the teacher was to disseminate information.

It is not. It never was.

Look at the great teachers of history. We don’t remember Socrates because he told people a lot of things; we remember him because he asked a lot of annoying questions that made people think about things. Teachers do not simply hand out facts; they shape minds.

Please note: I did not say teachers should not provide factual information to students. You can’t ask students to think about literature, history, science, and mathematics if they don’t know any of those things. And Googling a term is not the same thing as knowing something. Neither is reading a textbook chapter.

So, what is the role of the teacher when it comes to using a textbook? School districts spend millions of dollars adopting these things, and school boards all over the country engage in fierce debates about which ones are most appropriate for their students. Occasionally, we learn that a textbook presents information in a way that one group of people or another objects to. Or—worse—we learn that a publisher is presenting information differently in different states, as this recent New York Times story uncovered. Shockingly, we learned that the Texas and California versions of an American history textbook differed slightly in what they chose to include, and how they framed or presented that information—not only because of each state’s learning standards, but also because of the partisan politics that informed both the crafting of the standards and the adoption decision-making criteria of the local school districts. Shocking!

Except…is it? Textbooks are written by actual people, not machines—and some of those people, or their publishers, may have political biases, agendas, and points of view. Some of them may even be hypocrites who care only about making money. This makes textbooks different from every other book ever written…how?

The only way in which this discovery could be truly shocking is if we genuinely believed that textbooks (or any books) were supposed to be completely neutral, objective, and bias-free—that they could and had to tell the single, reliable, uncontestable “truth,” and that all a teacher had to do was assign students to read a chapter and then answer the questions at the end.

That’s nonsense. Every text has an author; every text has a point of view. That’s true even when an author tries not to have a point of view.

This is why, where young people are involved, every text needs a teacher. And every teacher has the right—the obligation, really—to take a stance regarding that text and engage readers in a critical dialogue about it—even if the extent of the dialogue is a single question, like, “How can we know whether or not this statement is true?”

I know: textbooks were never meant to be objects of critical debate. The whole point of a textbook was to take a tremendous amount of complex information, boil it down into bite-sized chunks, and feed it as effortlessly as possible into student brains, much the way a mama bird might chew up a worm before feeding it to her chicks. That’s why textbooks are invaluable if your goal is to cram students full of facts, and insufficient, or even problematic, if your goal is to get students to think. But in this hyper-partisan, fake-news, Russian-bot, deep-fake world, it is critically important to get students to think about the content that is streaming relentlessly into their brains. Even when that content comes from a textbook publisher. In the end, it’s not what the text does that matters most; it’s what you do with the text.

As Clare Basil recently argued, in defense of Classical Education:

This approach requires understanding our nation’s history, not only by reading a list of texts considered crucial to our history, but inquiring after how those texts––the ideas they embody and the movements they give rise to––shift how Americans define themselves as a people.

How can teachers do this? Not by limiting what students read or see based on their own biases; and not by suppressing their own voice and silently feeding text to their students. Teachers can help students start to think critically about what they read, and see, and hear, by asking three little questions—every day, all the time:

1. What do you think?
2. Why do you think it? (in other words, how can you prove that you’re right?
3. Why does it matter?

Or, if you want to get a little more complex, teachers can build critical thinking by doing the following:

• Providing historical and cultural context and perspective
• Demonstrating how to evaluate textual evidence
• Eliciting and challenging student opinions
• Holding students accountable for defending their opinions with evidence
• Introducing new information that supports or contradicts the text
• Teaching students the basics of rational argument, and the rhetorical fallacies that poor arguments make use of.

You can do this with an essay, a novel, a movie, a song. You can even do it with a textbook. You are not obligated to agree with every word a student reads, just because the district paid a lot of money to obtain those words. But you are obligated to engage with those words…especially if you disagree with them.

Look: everything that comes into a classroom, in physical or virtual form, is simply a resource for teachers to use. None of it can take the place of that teacher. Not even if the publisher says it can. Not even if the principal says it must.

Remember at the end of Dirty Dancing (if you’re old enough), when Patrick Swayze says, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner?” and pulls Jennifer Grey out onto the dance floor?

Well, I say: “Nobody puts Teacher in a corner.”

Grab that textbook and kick off your shoes. It’s time to dance.

 

Everything Counts

Originally published on the Achieve3000.com blog.

How do you prepare for an important challenge you’re about to face? Whether it’s running in a race, acting in a play, or taking a test, preparation usually involves honing your skills and then applying them in practice simulations. If you’re going to run in a 10K race, you might pace out the course to become familiar with the hills, turns, and potential bottlenecks. If you’re acting in a play, you rehearse the lines and stage movements with the other actors until your actions become second nature. Test-taking and reading practice are no different. You learn basic math and reading skills, and then you apply those skills in testing situations, so you can be ready for the “Big Show.”

The question is: can practice that is not laser-focused on the task-at-hand still be valuable?

In test-world, teachers sometimes think students should only practice their skills in the context of test-like scenarios in order to prepare for the final Test. Many educators fear that exposing students to other forms of assessment would confuse and distract them, or otherwise weaken their aim. But outside of test-world, nobody seems to talk that way.

Are you a runner? Well, then, you should certainly get to know the course before the big day, but any running you do will be worthwhile – whether it’s directly on the course or not. In fact, there are many benefits to practicing on a variety of terrains of varying difficulty, because you never know what might happen on race day. What if, for some reason, the police had to block off part of the racecourse and re-route people? This might make the actual course on race day hillier, or curvier, or just different. The same applies to studying, math and reading practice. If your training is too narrow, your ability to apply your skills and knowledge in the real world of change and unpredictability may be constrained.

Similarly, if you’re acting in a play, you should rehearse your lines and your movements as much as possible. You should have everything memorized. BUT…what if someone drops a line, or two, or twelve? What if a piece of scenery falls down and blocks the exit you’re supposed to use? Anything can happen.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, who led the Allied forces during and after the D-Day invasion (and should therefore know a thing or two about logistics), once said, “I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” Why? Because facts-on-the-ground can change, and therefore surely will change. Successful soldiers must be ready for anything. Successful racers must be ready for anything. To create a culture for successful students, we too must prepare them for anything.

Grant Wiggins used to say that every standardized test was a transfer task. He claimed that chasing after a test and thinking you could get your hands around it with any certainty was a fool’s errand. There was simply no way to teach every fact and figure required by the state standards, and no guarantee that a fact you chose to cover would definitely be included on the test. The blueprints were simply too broad, and the previous years’ tests, if they were available at all (and in many states, they weren’t) provided no guarantee of what might be asked this year. Teaching fact X to prepare for test question X was hopeless. You might hit that bullseye, but you might also miss the target.

That is why Wiggins talked about tests as transfer tasks. The goal, as he saw it, was to train and hone your skills like an athlete—both narrowly and broadly; in focused drills and in madcap scrimmages. As he said:

When I was a soccer coach, I learned the hard way about my players’ ability to transfer skills from practice to a game and the need to better assess for it. The practice drills did not seem to transfer into fluid, flexible, and fluent game performance. It often appeared, in fact, as if all the work in practice were for naught, as players either wandered around purposelessly or reacted only to the most obvious immediate needs.

The epiphany came during a game, from the mouth of a player. In my increasing frustration, I started yelling, "Give and go! Three on two! Use it, use it--all the drills we worked on!" At that point, the player stopped dribbling in the middle of the field and yelled back, "I can't see it now! The other team won't line up like the drill for me!"

Seen in this light, everything that makes use of core reading and writing skills counts. Reading graphic novels counts. Reading the sports page of your local newspaper counts toward your reading practice. Debating the merits of South Park vs. Family Guy counts. Writing witty YouTube recommendations to see if the algorithm is narrowing or broadening your interests counts. None of these things will manifest themselves directly on any state test, or likely on any classroom test, but they all help students practice their skills in reading comprehension and critical thinking.

Helping your parents find the best “snacks for the cost” while grocery shopping counts toward your math practice. Arguing with your friends about which NBA star’s shot record is better counts as debate and critical thinking practice. Learning that when taking a position on something like climate change in an argument, it’s incumbent on you to bring some evidence to the table—those things count, too. All these situations that build your critical thinking, your computational thinking, or your creative thinking count. And yes, so does practice in the context of the Big Test, to the extent you can predict its shape and structure. It definitely counts. It’s just not the only thing that counts.

Learning is cumulative and commutative and strange. Seeds you plant in one place sometimes grow into plants in an entirely different place. It’s a sometimes-blind investment, a leap of faith. When students have to perform in some kind of challenge, including a Big Test, they’re going to need to creatively apply their skills and knowledge, at least to some extent. Something will be strange and new and unpredictable. Something will not be “lining up nicely” for them. That’s where knowledge transfer comes into play. That’s where creativity becomes essential—because what is creativity, really, other than the putting together of existing things in new and unexpected ways? The more different kinds of LEGO pieces we have in the boxes of our brains, and the more practice we have in using them to build different things, the better we’ll be able to build when the need arises.

So, should I have my students read fiction if they are only going to be assessed on non-fiction? Yes—not only because fiction is a good in itself, but also because a crucial way to understand something is to contrast it with its opposite. What can an essay do that a story cannot? What can a poem do that neither can accomplish? Read about a single topic across multiple forms and genres, and you’ll come to understand the super-power of each genre a little better.

Should I give my students math problems with graphs and images if the Big Test only uses words and numbers? Yes—if only to learn how my students think. If my classroom test on fractions only uses numbers, and students get the questions wrong, I might think they don’t understand the concept. If I give them a variety of questions, using numerals, words, and images, and find that they score higher when a question includes an image, there’s something else going on.

Teachers and students are not archers trying to fire arrows at a single target, losing crucial points if they miss the bullseye. That is not how any of this works. There are hundreds of targets, each with its own bullseye. Every arrow fired is worth the effort. Every arrow fired increases our strength and accuracy. It all adds up.

Life is a transfer task. Everything counts.

Reaching for the Heights

The trailer for the movie, In the Heights, was released this week. Many people have been viewing it, sharing it, tweeting about it, and generally going bananas over it, miserable that they’ll have to wait until summer to see the movie. I remember having the same feeling when the soundtrack to Hamilton came out. In both cases, it didn’t take more than a single song to get people’s hearts racing. There is something in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s music that conveys the pure, exuberant joy of living in this country and belonging deeply to it. It’s not that he writes boppy dance tunes that make us mindlessly happy; it’s that he writes straight from—and to—our American hearts.

Because of where he grew up and when he grew up, and who is family was, and where he went to school, his music draws from Hip Hop and Rock and Broadway and Salsa and god-knows-what-other sources. He can do this, not because he is a scholar, but because he grew up the nexus of American musical and cultural streams. He took in everything, and he transformed it into something we had both never heard before and, at the same time, knew to be ours.

What other immigrant artists does he remind me of? George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, who did exactly the same thing in their own time, pulling in Jazz and Blues and Gospel and Classical and Folk and Music Hall and Klezmer, and creating music that had never existed before, but said “America” to much of the country during their lifetimes and ever after.

The purpose of the “melting pot” was not to boil everything down into an unappealing, gray mush, but to create a sizzling, spicy, amazing mélange—a thing both new and old—made up of many cultures and flavors and sounds, but all fitting together into something strong, compelling, powerful, and new—composed of its raw materials but transcending any of its component parts. That was, and is, our country at its best. When we meet everyone, and listen to everyone, and share each other’s stories, and taste each other’s foods, we end up creating new things that draw from the best of everyone and become something that belongs to all of us, and could only have been created by us. We create new things, and we become new things.

Do we have issues of cultural appropriation to deal with? Yes, we do. But there is a difference between stealing someone’s voice to use as your own, for your own benefit, and raising your voice alongside someone else’s and learning their songs. Cultural diffusion is not the same thing as cultural appropriation, and to blur the two and insist that It Must Stop is not only wrongheaded; it’s impossible. There is no such thing as cultural purity, any more than there is such a thing as racial purity. We are mutts, all of us, and however we define ourselves, that thing is the result of hundreds, if not thousands, of years of bumping up against, learning from, and borrowing from other people. I could argue all day that mutts are hardier and more valuable than purebreds, but in the end, it’s a ridiculous argument to have to make; among humans, there are no purebreds. The entire idea is nonsense.

But as we retreat from each other in fear and suspicion, we try to draw new/old lines around “our people” to define them in opposition to “those people,” and insist that everyone inside the magic circle is our family, our tribe. Retrograde nationalists, who didn’t used to be able to speak honestly in the public sphere, now feel safe in proclaiming that long before the United States was a constitutional republic, it was a LAND meant for a certain group of PEOPLE—and those people were of English and German or Dutch descent, full stop. Others may come, at the pleasure of the original settlers, but the land does not really belong to them. People say this, openly, in 2019. Even people not of the original “settler stock” say this. In no founding documents anywhere—at the federal level or the state level, or even in colonial charters, to the best of my knowledge—is peoplehood or citizenship or belonging defined by or limited to country of immediate origin. But they say these things, openly, in 2019. Irish and Italian and Greek and Russian and Polish and Korean and Chinese and Mexican and Dominican and Indonesian and Indian and African Americans (and on, and on, and on), beware: you are guests in this land, even if your family has been here for 100+ years.

Is it any wonder that members of minority groups respond to this kind of talk by drawing magic circles around their people and playing what the political right calls “identity politics?” The right loves to rail about identity politics destroying the fabric of America by focusing on small-group distinctions instead of large-group definitions, but they forget that this is reaction, not action. If African Americans take to the streets, chanting “Black Lives Matter,” instead of “All Lives Matter,” it’s because they’ve been told, relentlessly and violently and for generations, that they cannot consider themselves part of the “all.” All the marching, all the protests, all the activism, just to learn that large swaths of White America will never accept you as equal, regular, "normal" parts of the country. And when African Americans finally take White America at its word, we start posting nastily on Twitter about how THEY are refusing to act like part of US, and THAT is what is destroying our nation. What chutzpah…to use an expression from yet another minority group that’s being warned, after generations of relative peace and stability, that they don’t really belong here, and had better behave themselves. 

Take note of what these ethno-nationalists are saying: it does not matter what you believe, how you act, how you vote, or what creeds or principles you adhere to. If you belong to the wrong GROUP, you are not really an American...and you never will be. Alexander Hamilton's story is not and cannot be Lin-Manuel Miranda's, and to claim spiritual ownership of it is an affront to them. Barack Obama's presidency is an asterisk to them--a blip--and the current president's efforts to undo every accomplishment of that administration has nothing to do with political policy--it's about ethnic cleansing. Whether he says that or believes it, large numbers of his followers do, and it is explicitly why they follow him. That is what so-called conservatism has turned into. There are things they want to conserve, all right--we just need to be very mindful of what those things are.

And if we put up with it? Shame on us. If we participate in it in our own way, responding to other people's tribal retreats by circling our own wagons in smaller and smaller magic circles of "us," then shame on us even more.

Because...where will it lead? Will we have to change the Great Seal on our dollar bills?  Give up those the old, Latin phrases that no one bothers to teach anymore? Novus ordo seclorum? A new order of the ages? No. Sorry. The new world is just the old world, transplanted. We've chosen to resurrect all the old, comfortable hatreds. E pluribus unun? Out of many, one? No. Sorry. We've chosen to remain many. E Pluribus Pluribus. Get off my lawn.

And how will we redesign the Great Seal itself?  The fierce eagle, with thirteen arrows grasped—together—in a single talon, fighting a common fight, doesn’t feel right anymore. Neither does the giant pyramid, drawing Americans from all corners of the globe into a single point, with the all-seeing eye up top. Maybe instead of the pyramid, we can have a wall. A single, giant, slab—no dimension, no shading, no shape. Just a slab. And on the other side of the seal, perhaps, a giant middle finger extended—from everyone, to everyone, with the inspiring, Latin phrase: futue te ipsi.

No thank you. Not for me.

Listen, I like being a New Yorker. I like being a Jew. I like being all the distinct, different things that I am. But I also love being part of the crazy tapestry or bubbling melting pot or [insert your own metaphor here] that is America. This is my country. And I should be able to sing about it AND about my family, or my block. I am large; I contain multitudes. Yeah--I claim him as mine, too. 

Even in the middle of the fractious 1960s and 1970s, I grew up singing songs like this in school:

This is my country! Land of my birth!
This is my country! Grandest on earth!
I pledge thee my allegiance, America, the bold,
For this is my country to have and to hold.

Isn't there room in this vast, open country, to sing songs like that AND songs from our own communities? Can't we all contain multitudes?

In the Heights, I hang my flag up on display
We came to work and to live and we got a lot in common
It reminds me that I came from miles away

In the Heights
I’ve got today!

And today’s all we got, so we cannot stop

Today is all we’ve got...but we’ve got it together. Let’s not throw that away.

The Middle Way

Life is hard and we try to make it easier. Every technological advance we’ve ever made, from the digging stick to the Smartphone, springs from this simple statement. Life is hard and we try to make it easier. So it has always been; so it will always be.

There’s nothing very controversial about that idea, but what’s interesting is the extent to which our desire to make things easier for ourselves may undermine our efforts or make us less happy and successful. There is something in us that doesn’t really like it when things are too easy—and easier may not actually be better for us.

When I was a child, in the 1970s, the country was still in the middle of its love affair with technology and science. Processed food was better than natural food; infant formula was better than breast milk; TV dinners and microwaves were better than cooking from scratch. So much convenience! Life was hard, but technology could make it easier. It was the World of Tomorrow that Disneyland and the World’s Fair promised for much of the 20^th century.

The backlash started while I was still a teenager: maybe all those chemically processed things weren’t actually good for you. The Whole Earth Catalogue, health food stores, and whatever remnant of the hippie movement survived into their 30s brought a focus on authenticity and naturalness into the mainstream. And more recently, we’ve seen a different kind of backlash, against the very idea of ease. Now we want things to be “artisanal,” and we want to be involved in the making, ourselves, if we can. Cooking from scratch is difficult, time consuming, and requires some knowledge and skill, but for some people, eating pre-packaged meals (no matter how organic or healthy) is just…a drag. Suddenly we’re seeing all kinds of meal-kit services popping up to provide just enough ease, while still requiring us to do some of the work. It turns out that we actually like to do the work. We get enjoyment and satisfaction out of it. We appreciate the fruits of our efforts more when there is some effort. Just…not too much. Build your own furniture…with an Allen wrench from Ikea.

We’re seeing the same thing in automobile technology. Google and others are pushing hard for self-driving cars, and someday I’m sure there will be a percentage of people who make use of them. But for a whole lot of people, driving is fun, and the thought of surrendering all control is not a pleasant idea. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a future where most of us make use of a wide range of assistive technologies, while still keeping our hands on the wheel. We’ll end up doing some of the work—enough to get some enjoyment out of the process and feel a little bit in control—while still reaping the benefits of the assistive technologies that can unsnarl traffic jams and keep us from drifting out of our lanes.

What does this have to do with education? A lot! We’ve been searching for all kinds of ways to make learning easier, to increase student engagement and motivation. Schools adopt 1:1 laptop policies to put computers into the hands of every student so that they won’t have to take notes by hand. Schools de-emphasize memorization on the theory that the Internet holds all the factual knowledge students will ever need. Many schools use open-source videos to augment or replace textbook reading. At my son’s high school, the science teachers prepare PowerPoint presentations of their lessons and deliver those slide decks, with their notes, straight to the students. Everyone applauds to see adults making an effort to ease the path for students and not bog them down with old-fashioned schoolwork like memorization, recitation, note-taking, and textbook reading. But what if the drive to increase ease decreases learning? What if learning something actually requires a certain amount of effort?

Research seems to suggest that it does. Authors Peter C. Brown, Henry L., Rodiger III, and Mark A McDaniel provide a wide array of examples of how increasing student effort at learning also increases later retrieval of that learning, in their book, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Writing things down by hand seems to have a stronger effect on remembering what you’ve written than typing or dictating the same words. Memorizing and repeating basic factual knowledge helps build a foundation of conceptual understanding that makes all future learning more meaningful and stickier in the mind. Active manipulation of the instructional content, rather than passive viewing of it, makes a huge difference in how deeply and permanently that content is learned. Spacing out practice and assessment sessions over a period of time, rather than doing massed practice and testing shortly after instruction, allows some time for forgetting and makes the effort at retrieval both harder and more durable over the longer term. We’ve known for a long time that cramming for a test may help you on test day, but it doesn’t help you remember things a week later. Now we’re starting to understand why.

Some education thinkers and writers use the term “productive struggle” to talk about this idea that a certain amount of sweat aids learning. It’s like the idea of the Goldilocks Zone or Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development: that sweet spot where conditions are just right for growth. Make the work too easy and you won’t learn anything new from it; make it too hard and you won’t even be able to do it. Think of lifting weights in the gym: you could bench press a 1-pound weight all day, and it wouldn’t have much effect on your muscle tone. You could struggle all day with a 500-pound weight and accomplish nothing but a headache.

This makes the work of the teacher even more complicated than it already was, because every child’s zone of productive struggle is a little bit different from every other child’s—and not only that, but his zone of struggle may not be the same in math, English, science, or social studies…OR in Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 3, and Unit 4! Aim for the average every day—average amount of instructional time, average difficulty level of assignment—and you’ve made plans that fit no single student perfectly.

So what can we do? Assess constantly, adjust constantly, have alternative explanations and questions at the ready at all times. And most importantly…resist feeling sorry for your students when you see them sweat. Resist the urge to make things easier for them, unless you have really good data to guide you. You may not be doing them any favors.