I want you to think for a second about what it actually takes to walk into your classroom.
Not for a kid who reads at grade level, whose parents helped them with homework last night, whose brain processes language the way your curriculum assumes it does. I mean the kid who doesn’t have any of that going for them.
That kid sets an alarm. Gets dressed. Gets on the bus. Walks through your door. Sits down. And then — for the next six hours — attempts to do something that doesn’t come easily, in a place that wasn’t designed for how they learn, surrounded by peers who seem to make it look effortless.
Every. Single. Day.
Tell me that kid doesn’t care.
Here’s what I think we’ve gotten backwards. When a struggling learner fails to produce the outcome we’re looking for — when the quiz score comes back low, when the writing sample is underdeveloped, when the reading fluency is two grade levels behind — our instinct is to question their effort. Their motivation. Their investment.
But dig into the research on grit and persistence in high-achieving adults. The people who ended up being most successful aren’t always the most talented ones. They are the ones who kept showing up for hard things. Who didn’t let failure rewrite their identity. Who woke up the next day and tried again.
Sound like anyone you know?
Because I’d argue the struggling learner who shows up to your class every day — who tries to decode a passage they can’t quite read, who attempts a math problem using strategies that don’t click for their brain, who raises their hand even though they got it wrong three times already — that kid is running a grit gauntlet that your highest performers haven’t even approached.
The A student is working hard. Don’t get me wrong. But the struggling learner is working hard and doing it without the safety net of early success.
Without the dopamine hit of getting it right. Without the experience of having a teacher look at their paper and smile. They are persisting in the face of repeated failure. That’s not a lack of effort. That’s a level of resilience most of us would never sign up for voluntarily.
When we misread persistence as apathy — when we look at a kid who’s stopped raising their hand and assume they’ve stopped caring — we’ve made an error with real consequences. We’ve confused the symptom with the disease. The kid didn’t stop trying because they gave up. They stopped trying because, at some point, trying stopped being worth the risk.
Shane Lopez and Rick Snyder, who spent decades studying hope theory, would tell you that hope isn’t optimism. Hope is the belief that the future can be better than the present and the belief that I can make it so. Strip away the second half of that equation — strip away a kid’s belief that their effort actually connects to their outcome — and you don’t get a lazy student. You get a rational one. A kid who has learned, through experience, that effort doesn’t pay off for people like them.
That’s not a motivation problem. That’s a hope problem. And it is not a problem the kid created alone.
So here’s the question I want you to sit with — the one I want you to bring to your team this week: What would change in how we talk about struggling learners if we started from the assumption that they might be the hardest working kids in our building?
Not the assumption that they’re behind because they’re not trying. Not the assumption that if they just applied themselves, things would turn around. The assumption that they are already applying themselves — more than we know, more than we see, more than our grade books capture — and that the question isn’t whether they’re working hard enough.
The question is whether we are working hard enough on their behalf.
That’s a different conversation. A harder one. But it’s the right one.
And it starts Monday morning, if we’re willing to have it.
#steppingoffsoapbox
