Fun and Easy are Not Synonyms

There are two classes that I take at the YMCA with the same instructor, Matt.  (I have a lot of great fitness instructors that I like very much; but Matt is the best, and everyone should take his classes.)  One is called Group Power.  It is a weightlifting class.  I love it, but it is a challenging class for someone with little strength and zero balance. The other is Cardio Kickboxing, an energetic class with fun music and dance-y moves where I grin from ear to ear and never once look up at the clock.  For reasons that are beyond me, the difficult class is highly attended every week, and the fun class often only draws eight or nine people.  This week, I expressed my confusion about that to Matt.  Halfway through Kickboxing, he said, "Twenty-five minutes ago, you said this was the fun class.  Do you still feel that way?"  Well, yes, I had been jabbing and uppercutting and kicking and laughing at Matt and having a great time while dripping sweat.  Then, he said, "Let's show her it's not the fun class."  But it still was.  Sorry, Matt, it is fun, and there is nothing you can do about it.

I think what Matt heard was "Group power is hard, and Kickboxing is easy," but that is not what I said.  I said that Kickboxing is fun, so I don't know why its attendance is lower.  It is fun, but it is definitely not easy.

Here's the thing. Fun and easy are not the same.  I googled synonyms for fun, and the word easy is not on the list.

While I have never heard or read the word "clubbable" and have never used the word "convivial," I would definitely use the rest of those words to describe the Kickboxing class.  It is lively, amusing, and enjoyable; it is the highlight of my week.  I would never describe it with any of these synonyms for the word easy.

Being a cognitive science nerd, I can't help but see it everywhere now, even in a conversation like this.  The difference between easy and fun is an important thing when it comes to student motivation.  On Thursday, I read a summary of the Robert and Elizabeth Bjork study, from which they coined the term "desirable difficulty."  They found that there is a sweet spot when it comes to learning and motivation.  If a task is too difficult, students give up.  But if it is too easy, they get bored and stop paying attention.  

Wordle didn't take over the internet last year because it was easy, but people loved it because it was at a doable level of challenge, making it fun.  The same can be said for Sudoku, crossword puzzles, and challenging video game levels.  Enjoyment comes from challenge, and so does learning.  Our memories chuck out things that are too easy to learn.  If you don't put effort into thinking about it, you won't remember it (which is good - this is what prevents our brains from being overloaded with too many memories, like what every person you know wore yesterday and what you ate four days ago).  Teachers, recognizing this should help us construct learning activities that lie in the desirable range.  Students should have to think about concepts or dig into their memory for answers.  They should be getting some things wrong, or we haven't calibrated the level correctly.  There is nothing satisfying about accomplishing something that was too simple and easy, and learning will not result.

Yesterday, I gave Matt a heads-up that he would be making an appearance on this blog.  During that conversation, he suggested that the reason challenging things are fun is because of the endorphin release.  While I had connected that to physical training, that conversation was the first it had occurred to me to apply it to academic work as well.  Perhaps solving a difficult math problem or writing a high-quality essay releases endorphins as well.  I'll need to dig into Google Scholar to see if there is any research on this, but shout out to Matt for getting me to think about its academic implications.

It is important that we explicitly relate this to students so they will be more willing to take on challenges.  In spite of the motivation of challenge, we still have to overcome inertia to get started, so it can be helpful to have examples of the joy of meeting a challenge.  I do this in "pep talks," of course, but I like it better when it comes up naturally in the curriculum.  When I teach 8th graders about the Apollo era, one of the things I show them is JFK's "We choose to go to the moon" speech, part of a 1961 address at Rice University.  This is at the heart of that speech:

"But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? 

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too."

I love talking to students about this speech because they don't hear talk like this.  For sure, we aren't hearing it from politicians these days; they want to sell us on the idea that their solution to problems is easy, and no one ever has to sacrifice anything.  Students have access to a million technologies whose purpose is to make things easier.  Some of their parents email coaches and teachers to complain if they are being challenged.  Athletic coaches may be the only people truly encouraging them to do hard things on a consistent basis, but even then, I don't know if they are telling their players that the difficulty is, in fact, the point.  Yet, athletes know they feel more satisfaction when they beat a difficult team than they do when they win against the weakest team in the conference.

Nothing worth doing is easy, and it is important that our students know that.  Teachers, we are the people best positioned for showing them that day in and day out.  It's important that we model it by taking on challenges in our own lives, but I don't think they will draw the conclusion for themselves, so we should also take every chance we can to make it explicit.

Group Power is hard.  Spin classes are hard.  Boot camp is hard.  Cardio Kickboxing is hard (but it is also fun).  But with all of them, the hard is the point.  It's why I joined the Y in the first place.  After all, I was not pushing myself at home for free.  I wanted to be challenged, and that is, thankfully, what is happening.  Thank you to Matt, Stacey, Jay, Greg, and Liz for never making it easy.  Learning to read is hard.  Long division is hard.  Analysis of literature is hard.  The syntax of a foreign language is hard.  But the hard is the point.  It's why we go to school.  We want to learn the things we couldn't have learned on our own at home.

I'll end with one more quote, this one from Penny Marshall's masterpiece A League of Their Own.  

Speaking of making this concept explicit, our chemistry teacher has this quote framed and hanging by her classroom door, so students who have just finished a hard class can read it on their way out and remember that was the point.