Reestablishing the practice of relating praise to performance [“Telling kids they’re great isn’t so good, schools find,” front page, Jan. 16] will make the job of teaching more straightforward, but it won’t make it easier. The hard part is keeping a student’s frustration in the “Goldilocks” range — the work should be not too easy and not too hard, because optimum levels of challenge that can be frustrating are associated with maximum levels of learning.
Skilled teachers who love their jobs can do this day in and day out as they keep track of 20 to 30 students with different abilities day. This “impossible” task is the ever-reinforcing source of esteem that flows from teacher to student and back from student to teacher as they learn together.
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