People Confuse Difficulty with Rigor

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People confuse difficulty with rigor.

If you take undergrads and give them a graduate level textbook,

and you

• bury the intuition,
• skip the concrete examples, and
• make them fight through it anyway…

Yeah, the course is hard.

But hard does not automatically mean well-designed.

Sometimes it just means inefficient.

Sometimes it means painful for no reason.

Real rigor is NOT about making the path as brutal as possible.

Real rigor is about getting students to understand the material…

WITHOUT wasting their energy

on avoidable confusion.

Further reading: The Necessity of Grinding Through Concrete Examples Before Jumping Up a Level of Abstraction .

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