If you’re ever a contestant on Jeopardy®, you might offer the title of this post as the response to “This has made the video gaming industry immensely profitable.” Anne Murphy Paul has writes in the blog Huff Post Education:
“The key to making anything interesting is to make the task involved just hard enough.
The brain likes solvable problems. Too easy, and it gets bored. Too hard, and it gets frustrated. Either way, your engagement and attention flag and you lose your motivation to keep going.
It helps, of course, if you are genuinely interested in a topic, but it’s not necessary. Sometimes we have to pass a class we don’t like. Sometimes we have to work on a project that doesn’t grab us. We can still make it interesting by arranging the work involved to be just challenging enough, and by keeping the edge of the challenge sharp.”
Like many good writers, she’s reminding us of something we already know. How ’bout a rousing game of Tic-Tac-Toe? Candy Land? Can I tempt you with Hi-Ho Cherry-O? (That one was my son’s preschool favorite, and I’m not proud of how much I loathed that game.) Unless we’re entertaining a young child, these games don’t hold our interest. They’re just too easy to be much fun.
I suspect that some of my best students feel that way about my anatomy & physiology classes, as I attempt to lead the entire class through the swamp of cellular respiration or the endocrine cascade. When these “thoroughbreds” have grasped a concept, they’re eager to race ahead. Often one of them will ask a question or make a connection that tells me that they’re off and running. I’ll raise my hand to shade my eyes and say, “So-and-so is already way on down and around the bend….she can wait for us under that tree and we’ll catch up in a minute.” That seems to gratify my race horses, while reassuring the rest of the pack that they aren’t too far behind.
Except that sometimes they are.
Want to try aerial snowboarding? Juggling chainsaws? A few topological equations?
I suspect that some of my least-prepared students feel that way about my anatomy & physiology classes. When we feel that a task is far, far beyond our ability, we quickly lose interest in trying to accomplish it. Of course, some of my students who feel this way are selling themselves short. Maybe no one has asked them to try to master this much this fast, or maybe they’ve never asked much of themselves. I can offer strategies that may help some of these “Clydesdales” to reach the same finish line that the thoroughbreds cross with ease.
I suppose that a true master teacher knows how to make learning “hard fun” for most of her students. I can urge my hard-chargers forward while nudging the stragglers toward their next level in the game of A&P. When I offer both groups the opportunity to consider problems that have real-world connections, they seem to enjoy and benefit from the exercise. Advanced students can push themselves, while developing students can see firm evidence that their efforts are worthwhile. I often hear good peer-to-peer interaction, with students congratulating one another as their light bulbs come on.
Teaching itself may be the ultimate form of “hard fun.” It offers me daily opportunities to tackle solvable problems. How can I make a concept clearer? How can my explanation be more vivid? How can I invite my students to reach the next level? As Annie Murphy Paul notes, we just need to “keep the challenge sharp.”
pleasureinlearning 