Remove the verdict, not the difficulty

The usual fix for disengaged students is to make the material easier. At SPARK Summer Camp we tried the opposite: we kept the content hard and removed grades and attendance enforcement.

Students stayed with difficult work once nobody was handing down a verdict on them. The difficulty was never the problem. The judgment was.

I wrote this up as The Aristotelian Classroom, and a follow-up is checking what lasted. My working theory: people do not avoid hard things. They avoid being measured while doing them.