What does "rigor" even mean?

A reframe might help us better define how we should teach our students -- and what challenges we should pursue ourselves.

My colleagues talk a lot about “rigor.”

Last week, a student who I’ve taught, now, for over a year told me: “your poetry class is the hardest class I’m taking this year.” The student, who is historically an A student in Humanities courses, is also enrolled in AP Biology, Calculus, and other advanced courses for which I would assume she’s less innately equipped. I was, honestly, surprised.

“It’s not that the tasks are inherently harder,” she said. “It’s just that they make me think much harder.”

The word that I assume students would use to describe the course, a senior elective in Contemporary Poetry, is “different.” Not “hard.” I ask students to turn in short poetry analyses each week, but that writing is only assessed on three metrics, with no points given or taken for mechanics, formality, or structure. Projects for the course are not papers but multimedia projects that allow students to speak in their own voices, cross between disciplines, and think about where the lines (don’t) exist between life and art. They don’t even have daily readings: they read a book each week, and they read it when they want to. It’s different from a traditional English class, and because I’m proud of the difference of the course design, I love when I hear that students feel that difference.

I was delighted, though, to hear that it’s “hard.”

I know that the course is rigorous. Colleagues and parents, though, don’t: where’s the test? Where are the long essays? With grading tied to a limited set of metrics, what sets students apart?

Though we use the word “rigor” a lot, we often confuse rigor with crucible. The agony, the page count, the nitpickiness: they’re the smoke and mirrors that distract us from what rigor should really be. Rigor means thinking hard; the rigor of a course should be measured in the degree to which it demands students’ critical, constructive, and creative thinking. 

That principle applies across all disciplines. Exeter Math, increasingly popular around the world, prioritizes the principle that a truly challenging and rewarding education should foster conceptual understanding. Peons like me who enjoy the systems and linearity of math get grumpy when they face this more rigorous approach. 

In the Humanities, activities that meet this definition of rigor – that really make students think hard – often look fun. And that’s the thing: thinking hard is actually fun. Boredom is just as destructive to student motivation as is facing abject failure in the face of a too-challenging exam. 

This kind of rigor – the critical, constructive, creative kind – in the Humanities is particularly exciting to me because assignments that demand this kind of thinking can be differentiated effectively from student to student. Based on my definition, what is rigorous varies between students and also between adults. You can’t standardize it, and that’s a good thing, even if it makes assessment (and therefore standardizing systems like grades) more challenging to implement. As is often the case, prioritizing student learning requires us to step back from our desire to differentiate and rank students. Yes, it’s a challenge to figure out who earns an A or a B in my Poetry class. No, I don’t care about that difference nearly as much as I care about each student’s learning in the course. 

I think about a recent essay a colleague and I assigned, on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. As part of our instruction on the Salem witch trials, Puritan America, and McCarthyism, we taught some basic frameworks from Michel Foucault. Overall, our students found the unit interesting. But when they came to writing papers about the play, some students wanted to apply Foucault’s concepts of biopower to their analysis, deepening that exploration with ideas like nonobservance. Other students were still just wrapping their minds around the way that judgment works within the text, and Foucault only turned their minds around, rather than allowing them deeper access to the text.

In my estimation, one set of students didn’t have a deficit and another an advantage; rather, they had different acuities, and they build understanding using a different selection of the tools they’d been given. A student who starts off struggling to understand judgment can arrive at a masterful conclusion if she’s given support. She might even succeed in ways that the Foucault Lover couldn’t. Building more self-directed, less-traditional, even less ostensibly rigorous course material that truly prioritizes learning changes the feel of a classroom. What looks like fun might be rigor. It also might lead to higher rates of student engagement with challenge. It might just lead to more student success.

Reframing rigor can allow us to reframe the kinds of challenges we pursue even as adults outside of classrooms. 

Six or seven years ago now, I sustained a foot injury when I overtrained for a marathon. I’d run too many miles and incorporated too many sprints, and my podiatrist prescribed a lot less running. Forever. Part of what attracted me to running was the sensation that I was doing something hard, that the crucible somehow refined me and brought me a noble reward. I certainly love running for more reasons than just the intensity, but the pride was a large part of my addiction to mileage and speed. I had to find a new kind of challenge.

I tried to take HIIT classes that would leave me exhausted; I took barre classes until my limbs shook. Then, when I moved to Washington DC, I found a yoga teacher whose class made me feel week. I started to go every day. 

Yoga challenged me in a way that the endurance sports never had. My body ached and strained and shook in challenging moments, but the practice also required me to rest in unfamiliar, uncomfortable ways. It required me to exercise patience, open-mindedness, and rest as I pursued challenge. 

That experience embracing yoga embodies, to me, the spirit of the pursuit of rigor: rather than doing what looks and sounds hard, choosing a challenge that requires you to think much more creatively about what challenge even means.

It’s exciting to watch students pursue the kinds of open-ended, self-directed, creative challenges that rigor entails. In a classroom environment, and in our personal lives, pursuing those projects also requires intention and attention on an individual level and also from those who support us in our new, often scary, often not-so-serious-seeming but actually-really-hard pursuits. 

My favorite of Merriam-Webster’s definitions for rigor, when I think of education, is this: it is “a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable.” Learning should be challenging. People talk about a “rigorous education” as if schools with the harshest grading, the highest standards for the final product, are the most rigorous. For rigor, though, I look not to the way the product is measured but the nature of the product students are asked to produce: the more sophisticated that product is in its process, its abstraction, the complexity, the more rigorous it can be.

The tasks that students do in school – and the tasks that we take on as adults in pursuit of growth – should be sometimes inconvenient. They should be roadblocks to the certainty and predictability of life. They should give us an experience of success or mastery. Rigor doesn’t mean that the outcome of the assignment – the grade, the praise, the punishment – should make life difficult. It means that the task itself should make life difficult. 

And like my student, we’ll find that what makes life difficult turns out to be our favorite class.