Being challenged (in a good way)

Since the beginning of the school year I have been asking my students three questions every Friday to get an understanding of their sense of agency in mathematics. This is the third question on their survey and this past week, their positive responses really dipped. This got me to thinking about what it really means to "be challenged in a good way" in math class. Are the kids answering less favorably because they were challenged, but in a bad way? Or because they weren't challenged at all?

So I started asking around to my students. I asked the kids in my class and they responded on little post-its that they gave to me (most of theirs are comments on amendments to our classroom structure) They were things like:

Longer on warm-ups
Shorter on warm-ups
More project time
More worksheets
More groupwork
Don't make me work in groups as much

They also said things like this (more related to content):
I want to learn trig
Let us decide what content we want to learn
I'm challenged in not a good way because this statistics is hard

Asking the students to unpack this for me reminded me that there are 25 students in my class with 25 different needs and desires and helping them feel confident, passionate, and excited about math that is relevant, deep, and challenging is... well a challenge (but in a good way).