The puzzle paradox

Not so fun if you really can’t find your way out. (Image by Susanne Mumm)

When I started designing a school curriculum, my intent was to make things fun whenever possible.

After all, learning is fun. Why shouldn’t school be fun?

I added brain teasers, puzzles, and games to the menu — and discovered that they did nothing to entice reluctant students. They felt just the same way about the supposedly “fun” activities as they did about the straightforward “read this chapter and answer the questions” assignments. They inspired dread, mostly.

I had overlooked a basic paradox of education: The puzzles designed to make learning fun are only fun for the learners who are already having fun.

For the rest of the students, such puzzles are just another painful reminder of their weakness and inadequacy.

As someone who has always relished a good puzzle, this was hard to relate to, but I had to pivot. There was no point in giving an assignment designed to be fun an engaging to students who were going to avoid engaging with it and just try to get it done as quickly as possible. So I began reworking my curriculum to accommodate this new reality.

Eight years later, I’m still on a quest to reach learners who have been so traumatized by school that they eschew anything that makes them feel stupid. Addressing the issue head-on — for instance, by talking about how putting in effort actually makes you smarter — doesn’t work. It’s like lifting up a rock and leaving all the poor exposed creatures scrambling desperately for cover. It just drives students deeper into their conviction that they aren’t smart enough to learn.

Therefore, we’ve come up with a few ways of helping students who don’t like learning. First, we’ve got to help them heal. We do this by lowering the stakes and building trust. Missing or incomplete assignments are handled non-punitively, we praise whatever effort we see, and we make sure that, as teachers, our actions match our words.

Then, we’ve got to meet these students where they are. It does no good to raise the bar on someone who isn’t clearing the jump in the first place. It’s a path toward frustration for everyone. Instead, we need to simplify and break things down. It’s great if we can do that in hands-on, interesting ways, but I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to knock myself out trying to make lessons clever. Straightforward and efficient is often best. Optimizing for these traits is a gesture of respect toward a student who just wants to get the work over with.

After all, “fun” is in the eye of the beholder. Games are often based on competition and challenge, and those are two things that students have already had enough of if they’ve become disillusioned with learning. A confident learner might be intrigued by a question she doesn’t know the answer to; for a student who is afraid she’s unintelligent, such a question is a threat. When a fear response is triggered, learning won’t take place.

Even collaborative, cooperative activities can be fraught. Struggling students often prefer for their struggles to remain secret. They’ll be uncomfortable with anything that puts them on the spot or requires them to participate in a way that can make or break the team. Nobody wants to be the one who messed everything up.

The very thing I love so much about puzzles — the way they might utterly stump me for hours or days — is a sensation that my struggling students are all too familiar with. For them, there is no dawning light of comprehension. There is no deliciousness in the discomfort of not knowing, secure in the belief that the solution will arise. The rest of the class has moved on before the student ever gets a chance to get it. And this cycle happens again and again. The student doesn’t believe “getting it” is even possible anymore. Puzzles don’t tickle her brain — they torment.

It’s a suggestion I get a lot: “Hey, maybe the kids could do some math puzzles or games to make math more fun!” I’d love to be able to act on a suggestion like that. But for some of my students, puzzles are the enemy. My goal is to help them get to the point where they can do a puzzle and say, “Hey, I did it! I guess that wasn’t so bad.” But when I eagerly ask them whether they want to do another, they’ll probably say, “No thanks.” That’s okay. Something else is probably fun for them — and it may be a better use of my time to figure out what that is.