Rigor

As a second year teacher we have meetings with other teachers new to the building along with our mentors and some other important people from time to time.  Today we discussed "rigor" and what it means.
Personally, I'm not a fan of the term rigor as it is defined by dictionary.com: "strictness, severity, or harshness, as in dealing with people."  When I think of rigor it means always engaging students at K+1 (where as K=students' level of knowledge) with the aim of encouraging and inspiring each student to become an independent learner in order to be a productive global citizen.  We discussed this term in groups and came to some similar conclusions.
A theme that stuck out was the fact that representatives from most departments feel that we try to teach too much, but we don't go into enough depth.  One person from my department commented that she felt it was more important for students to be able to "put it all together" rather than know a bunch of random vocabulary.  I was excited by that comment and with the agreement of others in my department.  
It's disillusioning to have so much curriculum to "cover" but never really feel like the students are getting it.  It's frustrating to get to the end of the semester, just to realize you're standing by yourself and your students have been gone since week 2.  It's comments from colleagues like these that give me hope that the change I'm trying in my classroom, will be validated and will give others the opportunities to try changes they wish to see. 
What is rigor to you in the TPRS/CI/WL classroom?  What small victories have you had lately, since at this time of year, no victory is too small to celebrate?