Have you ever tried to teach a class full of people who may or may not have had any interest whatsoever in the subject matter? If you have taught most kinds of classes out there, you have probably at least mouthed the words, “they almost never care” by this point. That is, unless you have gotten so demoralized that you can barely bring yourself to care about them. After all, the obvious answer to the question that titles this article is, “yes, it is incredibly hard to teach people anything.” After all, you have got a few different archetypes of people who might be coming to your classes. You have the people who are simply not interested in the subject matter. You also have the people who have an interest, and are dedicated to proving you wrong, even if they are and you can easily bat away their attempts at debate.
Most of the people who walk into any kind of classroom are not going to care all that much about what you are teaching… or at least what you are trying to instill into the minds of those in attendance. For these types of people, education is not that important of a goal. And so they just sit there for a time, passively day dreaming, or taking a nap. While meditation is a good thing, it is not the intended goal of school, for the most part. Unfortunately, this is how most of your class is going to be.
On the other hand, you have that very tiny but extremely vocal subset of every student body, who is going to be completely against much of what you are attempting to say. Sometimes these are the kids who think that the Holocaust did not happen, or maybe they are of the opinion that the math you are attempting to teach them serves no useful purpose, even if you can rattle off several useful purposes that it serves. At any rate, these are the students who take away both your morale and that of the other students, if you let them.