Competition and Motivation
How do you get the best from everyone when they want opposite styles?
A couple of days ago, a math teacher named David Wees had a Twitter thread about “productive struggle” as a concept that does a nice job of laying out a mindset I can’t quite comprehend (click through for the whole thing):
As I said when I quote-tweeted it, this is an area where I wonder if I’m seeing this differently because I’m a Sports Guy. The idea that you have to struggle with a thing before getting it down just doesn’t play as a major negative to me, because I’m used to it from an athletic context. I expect the early stages of learning a new thing to be unpleasant on the surface, but recognize that as an essential step in the process of getting good.
I’m much more in tune with Rhett Allain’s sports analogy: “Confusion is the sweat of learning.” In the same way that going to the gym to “work out” but never breaking a sweat does not actually improve your physical fitness, a class where you’re never confused is probably not actually teaching you very much. That speaks to me in a way that would get me through difficult patches more effectively than a lot of attempts to make a difficult subject “fun.”
This goes to a much more general question of what motivates people, which I think tends to run hard up against the fact that individual preferences vary over a distressingly large range. I wrote about this back in the summer: a critical moment in my college career, that changed me for the better, was a comment from a professor that’s exactly the kind of thing we’re often advised to avoid. But it was the right motivational tool for me— what I needed was not a gentle hand, but a kick in the ass.
I end up thinking about this a lot, because this feels like a matter of innate temperament that carries over to a lot of things in my life and career. Even writing blogs and books, which might seem like one of the least jock-y things imaginable: a surprising amount of stuff that I’ve written has been motivated by thinking “I can do better than that person’s take on this.” This leads to a bit of frustration when shallow takes and shoddy writing end up getting more clicks and selling more books than my stuff, but there’s also a sense in which that keeps me going.
That competitive attitude doesn’t seem to be all that widely shared among my colleagues, though. At least not in an open way; some of the more publicly egalitarian members of the faculty are viciously zero-sum when it comes to fighting for institutional resources (but that’s a rant for the pseudonymous secret blog that I’ll never start because I would be identified within minutes). As a result, we end up creating a lot of structures that aim to avoid or minimize any openly competitive aspect.
(To give a concrete example that’s old and trivial enough to probably be safe: Many years ago, I was involved in a program that included running an election. When I sent out the results of that election, I included the complete vote totals, which seemed an absolute no-brainer to me, from the standpoint of transparency. I got a bunch of reply emails from people who were horrified that I had done this, because knowing the final margin might make the losing candidates feel bad. I found this mind-boggling, but not worth fighting over, so in subsequent years I just sent out the winners without the vote breakdown.)
A lot of this stuff ends up feeling blandly de-motivating to me. If the process isn’t a true competition, it’s not worth putting in the effort to do the absolute best job possible. I’d rather spend my time on things that I find more directly engaging.
On some level, then, if the goal is to get the best output from everyone, the question becomes how best to balance the motivational strategies to include everyone— to provide competition and kicks in the ass for those who need them, and support and gentle encouragement for those who need that. In an ideal world, we’d have options for both groups, but in practice it’s hard to get people to reliably sort themselves by psychological motivation, let alone to identify what will work best for another person.
I end up feeling that these days we skew more toward the non-competitive side of things, both in actual practice and especially in discussions in online spaces. There’s probably a decent case to be made for erring in that direction, based on the difference in consequences. Delivering a kick in the ass to someone who needs a gentler approach can drive them into a downward spiral, whereas coddling someone who needs their ass kicked just leads to them getting bored and wandering away.
To bring this back around to the start, though, I feel like worry over the concept of “productive struggle” might be a step too far. I just have a hard time getting my head around the idea of that being off-putting enough to be a problem. To my mind, the issue is not the struggle per se, but that the reward of getting good at math isn’t seen as worth the effort (and that society more broadly is too quick to excuse being bad at math, but that’s a different cloud to yell at).
But then, I guess I would say that, so…
I’m not sure this sort of cautious thinking-out-loud is useful to anyone else, but if I keep poking at it, I might eventually get my thoughts sorted enough to say something bolder. Should you want to be on hand for that, here are some buttons:
and if you want to take issue with any of this wibbling, the comments will be open.
I think this is a big problem for faculty. We are the people who made it to being knowledgeable and competent in our chosen fields, however we did it. Some people struggled and overcame their internal limitations; others struggled against a difficult or sadistic mentor or institution and thrived nevertheless. Some overcame the adversity of sexism or racism (at least overcome it enough to get a degree and get hired as a professor). And some breezed through, finding problems and ideas and methods easy and transparent that break the spirits of other people.
The issue for all of us is that it is remarkably difficult to imagine other paths to where we've arrived and in particular to imagine that our path is simply *wrong* for some of our students--that they cannot simply do what we did, because we are proof that it can be done. Some of what we are now cannot be done by some set of other people for any number of reasons. To teach really well, I think we have to imagine other paths--and to be able to think through what we don't understand about our own.
I had to click through to the thread to even be able to GUESS what they took issue with. I think "take issue with the language of productive struggle" is inapt and doesn't really describe what they take issue with - but it DOES describe a real thing that happens and that people take issue with. I think if they said "productive suffering" it would more accurately describe what they want to talk about.
Switching back to the weightlifting analogy - if you want to make serious progress (and not everyone who lifts weights wants to make serious progress) you have to lift weights heavy enough to experience pain, from the "are your pain receptors activating" perspective. But it is totally normal for a person to find the level of pain they experience when weightlifting to be so low that they find the entire experience enjoyable.
Back to math - like you said, if you're never confused, you're probably not learning. But some people find the transition from "confused" to "not confused" so delightful that even the state of being confused seems joyous to them. And that's great for those people, especially because it means they'll be successful even in a dysfunctional math education curriculum.
But the reason the curricula (in PARTICULAR the calculus curricula) were so dysfunctional for so long was the equating of suffering with learning. There was a widespread belief for a long time that calculus was hard, and needed to be hard, and if it didn't HURT, like, a LOT, then you probably weren't actually learning it right. I got to see this up close as someone close to me failed Calculus twice at a university using the traditional curriculum, and then on someone's recommendation took the same course for transfer credit at a community college and got an A, because the course was designed for learning instead of just tossing everyone into the material and expecting them to do it over and over until it clicked.
So there's my less cautious thinking-out-loud. I definitely agree with everything you said, and I'm still not totally confident I understand what the Twitter thread wanted to communicate.