Born Into The Trap
Every student is taught to chase the grade and skip the learning, how can we blame them?
A few weeks ago I was scrolling Substack, looking for ways to grow this newsletter. The one you are reading right now. I was doing the thing every person with a small audience does, which is hunt around for the trick, the unlock, the reason some writers take off and most never do.
I found an article called “The Mathematical Reason Most People Never Make It.” It was about creators. About the algorithm, about why a few posts carry an entire account while the rest go quiet. I clicked it for myself, eager to know how to make this thing grow.
Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped reading about Substack and started reading about my classroom.
That is the project here, if you are new. I am hunting for an honest answer to the oldest question a student ever asks, which is why is this important. I am doing it out loud, one essay at a time. This is the third stop on that hunt.
Price’s Law and the algorithm
The article was about a principle called Price’s Law. It comes from Derek de Solla Price, a historian of science. The TLDR is that in any group of people doing work, most of the work gets done by a very small slice of them. Not half the people. The square root of the people. For example, in a company of one hundred people, ten of them produce half of what gets produced. Fifty, and about seven carry it. The crowd fills in the rest.
You see the shape of Price’s Law cleanly on social media, which is where the article found it. A creator posts a hundred times. Around ten of those posts drive almost all of the growth. The other ninety go quiet. Every creator knows the feeling of the ninety. A post goes out, and the world does not answer.
Those ninety posts are not failure. They are how a creator learns, and how the algorithm learns the creator. The ninety are where a creator finds their voice, their real audience, what lands and what does not. Nobody hits their ten without first posting their ninety. The ninety is the training. The ten is just where the training finally shows.
Creators chase the ten. Once they find what works, they want to live there, they want every post to be a hit. That is the dream of the algorithm. Find the square root and never leave it.
The same shape, inside school
Reading this, I could not stop thinking about my school, because a classroom runs on the exact same split. Every course a student takes has a ninety percent and a ten percent. The ninety is the work that builds the student. The ten — the square root — is the result that shows.
The school, like the creator chasing the post that hits, fell in love with the ten and slowly stopped tending the ninety that produced it.
The school’s ninety percent
The ninety percent is the training. It is the quiet, undervalued work that builds a person, the same work a creator does in every post that lands on no one. The breakthrough, the day a whole room finally gets it, is the ten. That ten only arrives because of every hour that built toward it. A creator who decided the silent posts did not count would never write the one that breaks through.
A classroom changes the metaphor in one way. Most of the ninety percent does not belong to the student. It belongs to the teacher.
I facilitate the ninety percent of a student’s year in my specific subject. The teaching, the setup, the scaffolding, the thousand small moves no one grades, the way a hard idea gets broken apart and built back up. The student does his share, the practice, the struggle, the reps. I am responsible for the conditions that make his share possible.
There is a quiet cruelty in that. We are responsible for producing the ninety percent, and the ninety percent is the part the school values least. So the work looks trivial. The people holding the most important part of a student’s year are treated as though they hold the least important job in the building.
You will see later why this is no suprise.
The school’s ten percent
The student controls the ten percent. The score, the reflection, the thing that shows up on paper. The student embodies the result.
The ten percent is what gets measured. The test, the grade, the observed lesson, the number that goes in a column and travels up to the district. It is what a student produces and what the school records.
It is real. It is also a highlight. The smallest, shiniest slice of a year, the part that holds still long enough to be counted. A test score tells you what a student could show on one morning. It does not tell you the year. It does not tell you the ninety percent that made the morning possible. It is never the whole story.
The institution idolizes the ten percent
The school did what the creator does. It found the ten percent and idolized it. It measures the ten, funds the ten, builds its decisions on the ten. The grant follows the test score. The administrator’s review follows the graduation rate. The whole building is tuned to produce the ten and celebrate it the moment it arrives.
The gradebook says it plainly. The ninety percent of a student’s day, the practice, the classwork, every struggled-through problem, the part that actually builds him, carries almost no weight in the grade. The weight is carried mostly by tests and assessments. The square root, showing its face once again.
That is not a quiet accounting choice. It is a signal — one that has a compounding reach. A student reads the gradebook and learns where his effort is worth spending. A parent reads it and learns what to push their child toward. It is the clearest message a school sends a family about what matters, and it says the part building the child barely counts.
No one ever voted that the ninety did not matter. The institution forgot it the way institutions forget anything they stop measuring. It kept the ninety on the page and let the value drain out of it.
The trap
There is a reason none of this is easy to walk away from. A reason why we can not just “flip the switch” to prioritize focus on the ninety.
The ten percent is not just a grade. It is the currency of a student’s future.
Colleges read it as readiness. Scholarships are awarded on it. Financial aid formulas turn it into real dollars. A grade point is not a mark in a gradebook anymore.
It is the price of admission and the size of the check.
So a parent is not foolish for caring about the ten. A parent is forced to. A student is not shallow for chasing it. His future is wired to it.
The school is just as trapped. Its grants, its rankings, its administrators’ jobs all ride on the ten percent. No one in the building is free to simply choose the ninety.
So the ninety becomes a luxury. The slow work, and the time it demands, begins to feel optional, something a family indulges only once the result is secured. Asked to choose just one, almost everyone takes the ten, every time. If they cannot have both, they will take the result that opens the door and let the learning be a byproduct, if it shows up at all.
So ask yourself honestly. Imagine two schools. The first hands your child real challenge, builds real skill, and reports it truthfully as an eighty. The second guarantees a perfect hundred and a seat at a good college, and you are never quite sure what was learned underneath it. Which do you pick?
Most people pick the hundred. Not because they do not value the work, but because the world has told them, in money and in admissions letters, that the grade is the thing that counts. That is the trap. Everyone says they want the learning, and everyone is steered to buy the grade instead. It is the trap every student is born into.
AI automated the ten percent
For a long time forgetting the ninety was survivable, because the ninety did not need anyone to value it. It survived in the one place the institution could not reach: the student himself. The work of the ninety still had to pass through a real person. The struggle still had to happen in someone. Now the ninety can be skipped by something.
That is what is changing. Artificial intelligence reaches that last place. It offers every student the same bargain the institution already made: keep the ten, skip the ninety, one screen at a time. Get to the finished ten percent, for free. The answer, the essay, the lab conclusion, handed over clean and complete.
Every step of the ninety skipped.
The irony is that the ten percent still gates college, signals readiness, and unlocks the scholarship. Yet it is now the one thing a machine produces instantly, better than any adult alive. Better than the student. Better than me. The whole system runs on a currency a machine can counterfeit for free, and schools still grade students on whether they can mint it by hand.
The shortcut is not the real damage. The lesson underneath it is. Every time a student takes the finished answer, the tool teaches him something. That the struggle was never necessary. That the hours of underlying work were a tax he no longer has to pay. That perseverance is obsolete. He is not just skipping the ninety percent. He is learning to believe it never mattered. It is the same lesson the gradebook, the school, and the colleges have been teaching him all along.
Now the machine teaches it too.
Why we must not forget about the ninety
The ninety percent is not a product to generate. It is the work it takes to get there. No one can generate the hours that turn a student into someone who can do the work. The value flipped while the gradebook was not looking. The part the school priced at almost nothing is the only part still worth a human’s time.
Two things are true at once, and they pull in opposite directions.
One. A student cannot see why the ninety percent matters, because his entire education has taught him to chase the ten. The test was the goal. The grade was the goal. He was trained to skip to the result.
Two. The world he is walking into will not need a body to produce the ten. It will need people who can endure the ninety. People who can sit in the unfinished middle of something hard, find value in it, and grow through it. That is the exact capacity the trap is training out of him.
That leaves me the strangest job in the building, and for a long time I thought of it as impossible. Convince a fifteen-year-old to pour himself into the part the gradebook values at almost nothing, while colleges, scholarships, and a machine all tell him it does not matter.
How could I talk a student out of the most rational thing he could do?
I had it backwards. I am not standing outside the ninety percent trying to sell it. I am responsible for it. The student produces the ten. We facilitate almost all of the rest. The job is not to win an argument about a gradebook. It is to stop grading our own work by the student’s ten percent — the highlight that was never the whole story. And to teach a student to navigate the trap, the one that has parents, colleges, and the whole system convinced the grade is the prize. To value the part that builds over the part that shows, even when the world keeps paying for the show.
“Why is this important?”
I started this hunt looking for the trick to grow a newsletter. What I have instead is a question I still can not finish and a stack of essays the world has not answered yet. This newsletter is my ninety percent too. The slow part. The part that builds the person who could one day do the rest.
I told you at the start that I am hunting for an honest answer to one question:
“Why is this important?”
I still do not have the whole thing, but I am slowly collecting it in pieces.
The last piece was that the answer is not something I can hand a student. It is something he has to carry himself until the world hands it back.
This is the next: The thing worth carrying is the ninety percent. Not the answer, which anyone can get for free now, but the slow work of becoming the kind of person who could have produced it. “Why is this important?” Because the doing was always the point. It is the one part of a person a machine cannot generate, and it is the part the world is now teaching students to skip.
The ninety percent is building my students this week, in the work they cannot yet see the point of. It is building me, in the question I cannot put down.
It is building you, in whatever you keep wanting to skip.
So I am still carrying the question, out loud, watching what the world gives back. This week it gave me something I cannot stop looking at. The students skipping the ninety do not feel like they are losing anything. They feel capable. A finished answer looks exactly like understanding, right up until someone asks them to do it without the screen.
Eighteen years of I can. Then, the first time it truly counts, I cannot, and the time to have become the person who could is already gone.
There is a name for the distance between feeling capable and being capable. I will be back next week with it.
— Chase