The challenge of ease

As students, the hunger for achievement and approval leads us in strange directions.

Some of us are ashamed of doing material that feels like "review," even if it isn't actually mastered. 

We'd rather push through, no matter how uncomfortable and frustrating it is, than slow down, take our time, and master whatever it is that we're working on.

So we grimly practice adding and subtracting negative fractions -- even though we don't know how to add or subtract positive fractions, or even truly understand what a fraction really represents, and are still struggling to add and subtract negative integers. 

We lift weights that are too heavy by using poor technique and force of will.

I vividly remember my high school choir singing music that was too difficult for us (and that we sounded awful on) so that we could qualify for a higher rating at a vanity competition.

Where does this come from? 

It seems to be a major part of our culture. In so many movies, we've seen the experts scoff "It can't be done," only to see the (inexperienced, underprepared) hero achieve the impossible (and get the girl). 

And with slogans like, "No pain, no gain," "Just do it," and "Go big or go home," we are told that winning requires sacrifice, brutally intense effort, and mercilessness -- and that winning is the ultimate goal.

No wonder that when our teacher gently says, "Let's take this slower," or "Let's back up," we want to double down and simply try harder.

But all that darn striving really makes a teacher's job more difficult. And makes learning more difficult. A teacher’s efforts are thwarted by a student's insistence on pushing forward no matter what.

For an elite athlete, musician, or anyone else at the top of their field, success does indeed come from intense effort. But this effort is balanced by rest, supervised by coaches or other professionals, and grounded in a strong foundation of skill, expertise, and experience.

And more often than not, that foundation is built out of prioritizing ease, efficiency, and the continuous improvement of tiny nuances of performance over time -- not struggle, pain, and desperate attempts to leap forward.

What if the entire learning process has effortlessness built into it? Shouldn't step one be easy? If you add step two when the student is ready, that will be easy, too. And so on -- ease upon ease.