Why “You’re Not Trying Hard Enough” Has No Place in a Classroom
I was sitting in a low plastic chair at the back of my son’s math class last October. Ms. Delaney, his teacher, had set aside twenty minutes for me to observe—a chance to see how Marcus was doing after a rocky start to fifth grade. His homework had been coming home half-finished, and we’d exchanged a few emails about “focused effort.”
That morning, the class was working on a division worksheet. From where I sat, I could see Marcus’s page was mostly blank. One problem done, then careful spirals doodled in the margin.
Ms. Delaney noticed from across the room. She walked over, put a hand on his shoulder, and bent down. “Marcus,” she said, “you’re not trying hard enough.”
It wasn’t harsh. It wasn’t shouted. She said it with what seemed like genuine concern—and I’d heard the exact same sentence myself dozens of times growing up. It never once made me try harder.
I watched Marcus nod, pick up his pencil, and fill in answers for the next six minutes. When the class moved on, I saw that most of what he’d written was wrong. The sentence hadn’t made him try. It had made him perform compliance. Those are two very different things.
On the drive home, I asked what he thought about what Ms. Delaney had said.
“She just thinks I’m lazy,” he said.
Kids rarely parse the exact words we use. They parse the meaning underneath. When a teacher says “you’re not trying hard enough,” what a student often hears is “you’re lazy” or “you’re not worth my patience.” It’s a verdict on character, not a comment about a worksheet.
And here’s the uncomfortable part: I’ve been that teacher. I taught middle school for six years before moving into administration. I know why the sentence slips out. You’ve got twenty-two students, a clock, a curriculum, and one kid staring at the ceiling. You can’t stop everything to run a diagnostic assessment in that moment. So you reach for the most available tool in the classroom box: the assumption that if a kid isn’t producing, it’s because they aren’t trying.
But a blank page almost never has a single cause. Maybe the child didn’t understand yesterday’s lesson, and every problem today is a locked door. Maybe they’re anxious about being wrong in front of peers. Maybe they have an attention issue they can’t switch off through willpower. Maybe they’re tired, hungry, or carrying something from home that has nothing to do with math. There are dozens of reasons why a child stops working. “Not trying hard enough” covers exactly one.
The sentence also closes a door. It states something about the child’s effort, putting the responsibility for fixing it entirely on them. It doesn’t open a conversation. It doesn’t ask a question. It’s final.
Ms. Delaney isn’t a bad teacher. That’s worth saying clearly. She’s warm, experienced, and runs one of the most organized classrooms in the building. She said what she said because this phrase is everywhere in education. Teachers say it. Parents say it at the kitchen table without thinking. It’s become the default way to express “this student is frustrating me,” and it leaks out.
The research on motivation agrees with what kids feel: telling a child they aren’t trying hard enough tends to make them disengage further. It reinforces a fixed belief about themselves. “I’m the kid who doesn’t try.” They start acting like the role they’ve been assigned.
So what can a teacher or parent say instead? Over the years, I’ve collected a few replacements that take the same amount of time to say, which matters in a packed classroom.
“What’s making this hard right now?” — Turns the comment into a question, and the child gets to identify the actual obstacle.
“I noticed you only got through one problem. What happened?” — Descriptive, not accusatory. It leaves room for a real answer.
“Let’s do the first one together.” — No judgment of character. Just an action that says “I’ll sit beside you.”
“Do you need me to go back and explain this again?” — Puts the adult on the hook, which is honest. Sometimes the struggle is the teaching’s fault, and that’s not a failure. It’s information.
None of these are magic. Some days a child will still stare at the page. But the principle is simple: start from curiosity instead of accusation. Observe what’s actually in front of you, then treat it as a shared problem to solve, not a flaw to correct.
A few days later, I talked to Ms. Delaney. I made sure not to sound accusatory, because I genuinely respected her. I described what I’d seen from the back of the room—Marcus’s face shutting down, the pencil moving without thinking, the wrong answers. She listened, then said something I’ve never forgotten.
“I know. I said it before I thought about what it meant. I say it when I’m out of ideas.”
That honesty opened a door. We made a small agreement. For three weeks, she wouldn’t tell Marcus he wasn’t trying. Instead, she would put a star next to the three problems she thought were hardest and ask him to pick one. She’d check in after five minutes. If the page was still blank, she’d say, “Okay, let’s start together.”
The first time she let him turn in a half-done page without a lecture, he came home and said, “Ms. Delaney asked me what was hard. I told her division.”
He’s still not naturally strong at math. Division is still slow. But something shifted. He doesn’t freeze the same way anymore. He raises his hand. Last month, he asked a question in class without first checking to see if the teacher was annoyed with him.
I don’t know if “you’re not trying hard enough” will ever really disappear from classrooms. People say it out of exhaustion, out of habit, out of love. I’ve said it to myself as an adult more than I’d like to admit. But it’s a sentence that stops conversations instead of starting them. And when I think about what schools need most—more honest back-and-forth between adults and kids about what’s actually in the way—it’s a sentence we can probably afford to retire.
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