Robert Talbert's Tumbleblog

If you start a lesson off by telling the students “This is going to be easy”, you are simultaneously telling them “We had to make this easy because we don’t think you’re capable of doing anything hard”. And when the lesson is over, the only sense of accomplishment they can feel is that they did something easy. So what?

Learning is hard work. If you are not working hard, you are not learning. Period. Kids love hard work, as long as they see where it’s going and why. Instead of killing that energy by giving them something easy, we should foster it by giving them something really hard. We should tell them it’s hard. We should give them the chance to do something meaningful.

- Theodore Gray, from The Beginner’s Guide to Mathematica, v. 4