By: Elana Karopkin-Gold

After my last post on rigor and purpose, two questions emerged that initially seemed to pull in opposite directions.

One colleague asked: 

What about students who find meaning precisely in difficulty – who thrive on texts like Shakespeare or problems that resist easy entry?

The other question came in an email, urgent and full of care:

I find that with students who are reading at third grade levels (so many in my HS, it’s frightful!) and those with hyper-toxic home lives, that meeting them with humanity without the need for output OR giving them very rote, approachable materials are the two things they actually feel capable of. Much of the curriculum you are speaking about partially or completely shuts them down. 

These questions appear to ask different things, one about students who seem not to need motivation, another about students who seem unreachable. But both are asking the same fundamental question: Is purpose necessary for all students, or just some?

We believe it is necessary for all students. Here’s why.

Even Students Who “Love Challenge” Usually Have an Entry Point

When we talk about students who love Joyce or thrive on hard math, it’s easy to assume they simply crave challenge. Sometimes that’s true. But more often, these students have access to difficulty because they already have multiple entry points into the work.

They have enough skill to enter without immediately drowning. They have past experiences of success that make struggle tolerable. And they are often – sometimes unknowingly – already drawing on purpose.

A student who persists through an opaque text may be independently drawing on one of these elements of purpose:

• Identity (“This is the kind of person I am / want to be.”)
• Authenticity (“This feels real—like what serious readers/scientists/historians do.”)
• Agency (“I can figure this out if I stay with it.”)
• Relevance (“This connects to something I care about.”)

They may not call these things purpose, but purpose is operating nonetheless.

So, this isn’t about students who need purpose versus students who don’t. It’s about students who have often already internalized ways of managing through struggle and who can persist in challenge versus students who need those pathways explicitly designed. Purpose is operating in both cases, but for some students, it’s invisible.

And let’s remember that students don’t all need the same entry point at the same moment. What animates a student in English may not animate them in science. Even a student who doesn’t need explicit purpose to persist through Joyce may need it to push through an AP Biology unit or a challenging proof in geometry. In other words, it’s not that some students are capable of complex thinking and others are not. The gap is that students arrive to different contexts differently able to access challenging material and our job is to design learning so that more students can build that access across a broad variety of disciplines over time.

Purpose is how we widen access to difficulty – so that more students can do hard thinking, not just the students who have already learned how to enter rigorous work.

For Some Students, Difficulty Doesn’t Feel Hard – It Feels Unsafe

For some students, however, the barriers to accessing difficulty aren’t just unfamiliarity or lack of skill. They are psychological barriers created by past educational harm.

Educational trauma forms when students experience repeated messages – explicit or implicit – that they are behind, incapable, deficient, or invisible. Over time, many students develop predictable adaptations: disengagement, resistance, or an insistence on work that feels rote and contained.

When students ask for worksheets or “mindless” tasks, it is tempting to interpret this as laziness or lack of curiosity. More often, it is a bid for safety. Rote work offers something profoundly important to a student who has been academically wounded: a sense of efficacy.

I can do this. I won’t fail publicly. I won’t be exposed.

Through this lens, requests for low-level work are not rejections of thinking; they are actually evidence of how dangerous thinking has felt in the past. This is where purpose matters most. Purpose helps students answer the question: Why should I risk trying?

Purpose has multiple entry points, not just one. Some students persist because the work connects to their lives (relevance). Others persist because it builds toward a future they can imagine (identity). Others because they feel responsibility to a group, a community, or an audience (authenticity). Still others because they experience genuine choice in how they approach the work (agency). Often – and ideally – it’s more than one at once.

Purpose is not a crutch for some students. It is a design requirement for learning for all students.

Low Skills Don’t Mean Low Thinking

One of the most damaging myths in education is that low reading levels necessarily imply low intellectual capacity. In reality, many students who struggle with academic skills have rich perspectives, strong opinions, and sophisticated understandings of complex issues – especially when those issues connect to their lived experiences.

When educators listen carefully to what students say about topics that matter to them, they often hear powerful thinking about justice, power, identity, belonging, and resilience. This thinking can be surfaced, named explicitly, and then applied in new contexts.

Consider a student who articulates how power operates in their neighborhood – who has it, who doesn’t, what happens when it shifts. That student is already thinking in ways that unlock Macbeth. The teacher’s job is to help them recognize the concept, name it explicitly, and then transfer it: You’ve been analyzing power dynamics in your community. Shakespeare was obsessed with the same question. Let’s see how he explores it.

Sure, fluency across types of texts is a type of rigor, but students don’t need to be in a holding pattern mastering that kind of rigor before they have access to another, more powerful and transferable kind of rigor: deep thinking and grappling. When students can locate a reason to engage – and experience early evidence that they can engage – teachers can help them abstract the concepts they’re already using and apply those concepts to unfamiliar texts, historical moments, scientific problems, or literary works.

This is how students get to Shakespeare. Or Joyce. Or advanced mathematics. Not by avoiding difficulty, but by building the conditions that make persistence possible.

Rigor Starts with Purpose, Not Just Harder Work

I don’t read the email from my colleague as pessimism. I read it as love – love for students, and grief over a system that too often forces teachers to choose between meeting students with humanity and holding them to intellectual ambition. But we don’t have to choose.

Rigor does not begin with harder tasks; it begins with purpose: designing learning so that students have a reason – and an entry point – to do hard thinking. That is not a dilution of rigor; it is how rigor becomes possible.