Difficulty vs. Rigor

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People confuse difficulty with rigor. If you take undergrads and you give them a graduate level textbook, you skip the concrete examples, and you just make them fight their way through it.

Yeah, the course is hard, but hard does not automatically mean well-designed or that they’re learning more. Sometimes hard just means inefficient.

It takes you a lot more work to ultimately get to the same place you could have gotten with a lot less work, just concentrated on the areas that are gonna move the needle the most.

Sometimes a hard math course is just painful for no reason. And that’s the thing about rigor vs. difficulty.

Real rigor is not about making the path as brutal as possible. Real rigor is about getting students to understand and master the material without wasting their energy on avoidable confusion.

Further reading:

• It’s Incredible How Poor Math Instruction Can Be
• The Necessity of Grinding Through Concrete Examples Before Jumping Up a Level of Abstraction

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