Cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham wrote a book called Why Don’t Students Like School? The book is complex and fascinating – and 228 pages – but you can basically boil the answer down to this: Students don’t like school because school isn’t set up to help them learn very well, Mind/Shift reports. The first thing to know is that everyone likes to learn. “There is a sense of satisfaction, of fulfillment, in successful thinking,” writes Willingham. But it’s not fun to try to learn something that’s too hard. “Working on a problem with no sense that you’re making progress is not pleasurable,” writes Willingham. “In fact, it’s frustrating.” Working on a problem that’s too easy is no fun either. It’s boring. What people enjoy is working on problems that are the right level of difficulty…
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