What to Do When Students See Schoolwork as Too Challenging

A teacher hands out the exact same assignment to every student in the room. One student starts immediately. Another freezes. A third stares at the page as if someone just handed them a mountain.

Technically, the task is identical. Psychologically, it is not.

To understand the difference, we can look to a series of experiments on whether people’s perceptions of the difficulty of a task are determined objectively or are affected by physical and emotional factors. In the experiments, researchers asked participants to estimate the steepness of a hill under different conditions to see how they assessed how difficult it would be to climb the hill.

Researchers found that the hill appeared less steep when participants stood beside a trusted friend, felt socially supported, were physically rested, or were not carrying additional physical strain, like a heavy backpack. The hill itself never changed, but participants’ perception of how difficult it would be to climb shifted depending on the resources and support they felt they had available.

Those findings matter far beyond psychology labs—they matter for us as teachers because students are constantly estimating the “steepness” of school. A writing assignment can feel impossible when students feel isolated. The exact same assignment can feel manageable when they feel supported.

Students do not measure academic difficulty objectively. They measure it emotionally.

The Invisible Weight that Students Carry

Some students walk into classrooms carrying anxiety, repeated failure, loneliness, trauma, or the belief that they are simply “bad at school.” Those invisible weights affect how difficult learning tasks feel.

Years ago, I noticed some students disengaging before even attempting difficult work:

• “I can’t do this.”
• “I’m bad at English.”
• “What’s the point?”

At first, I tried encouragement. Eventually, I realized they did not need more positivity. They needed something that made the hill feel climbable, so I stopped designing my classroom around performance alone and started designing it around visible progress and emotional support.

Here are four ways to help make learning feel easier for students, even when they face a difficult task.

4 Ways Teachers Can Make the Hill Feel Manageable

1. Let students climb beside someone: One of the easiest ways teachers can apply the findings from the hill experiments is to set up opportunities for collaboration. Students are more likely to attempt difficult work when they are not struggling alone. Partner discussions before independent work, collaborative problem-solving, peer revision, and small group thinking routines all reduce the psychological difficulty of a challenge.

In my classroom, I noticed students would attempt far more difficult literary analysis during partner conversations than they would independently. The assignment had not changed, but the hill felt easier because someone was climbing it with them.

2. Become a source of emotional support: Teachers themselves can become a source of emotional support. Students work harder when they believe someone believes in them. A quick check-in, a calm response after failure, or a teacher kneeling beside a desk can dramatically change how students experience difficulty.

Research on belonging consistently shows that supportive relationships increase resilience, engagement, and persistence. Students are more willing to climb difficult hills when they trust that someone will help if they stumble.

3. Reduce the size of the first step: Sometimes students are not refusing to work—they are overwhelmed by the size of the challenge they see in front of them. Research on self-efficacy shows that people build confidence through small mastery experiences that create momentum. So instead of leaving students to ponder the whole hill, I started directing their focus to the first step.

Instead of saying, “Write the essay,” I began saying, “Let’s build the first sentence together.” Momentum changes perception, and once students begin moving, the hill often stops feeling impossible.

4. Give students emotional anchors: I also began using something unexpectedly powerful. During difficult moments, I would give students a short emotional support letter written by a family member, coach, former teacher, or trusted adult, or sometimes me. Each letter reminded the student of their strengths, growth, resilience, or kindness.

These were not recommendation letters. They were emotional anchors.

Students who struggled to see themselves as capable began borrowing belief from people who already believed in them. I kept the letters in a drawer, and when a student seemed overwhelmed or discouraged, I would quietly hand theirs to them. After they read it, the letter went back into the drawer, waiting for the next moment they might need the reminder.

The hill perception experiments help explain why this mattered, as the research found that hills appeared less steep when people felt supported. The letters reminded students they were not climbing alone. Many students reread them before tests, presentations, or difficult assignments, when the academic hill started feeling steep again.

The Real Work of Motivation

Teachers often feel pressure to make every lesson exciting. But motivation is not built through entertainment alone. It is built when students begin believing the hill is climbable. That happens through support, teacher belief, relationships, and small wins. It happens through experiences that help students see themselves becoming capable.

The hill experiments remind us of something important: The challenge that students face is not always the challenge we think they see. Sometimes the most powerful thing a teacher can do is not to remove the hill—it’s helping students realize they are strong enough to climb it.