Like any fourteen month old, my daughter has had her share of difficulty. Whether the result of realizing she can’t carry three plastic balls in two hands or growing increasingly frustrated with the task of carting a book twice her size to a willing reader’s lap, Gravy (yes, that is one of her nicknames…) has developed her own age-appropriate way of venting said frustration. She whines. Grunts. Throws the offending object, then sits down (or falls over) and cries.

I should probably be ashamed to admit that as her mother I find this slightly amusing. If you will allow me to brag for a moment, my daughter has a large vocabulary for her age and can communicate quite well using a few basic words. But she has not yet learned the lexicon of difficulty, not yet grasped how to tell us, “Hey! This is hard!” So back to my original statement – I do find this amusing, largely because she reminds me of the ninth graders I used to teach. At various points during the year (sometimes every other day), my students would throw up their hands, look me in the eye and say, “I don’t get it. It’s too hard.” In my early days fresh out of undergrad, I would screw up my sternest teacher face and ask, “Did you read it?” Yes, they would answer. “Did you try to understand it?” Yes, again. Doubting the veracity of those claims I would plunge them right into the lesson. My, but was I naïve.

No wonder so many college students hate their high school English classes (as Edith stated in last week’s discussion). Students are rarely taught to embrace difficulty, to look at the niggling complexities of a text with wonder and excitement. They are rarely told that it’s okay to struggle. To struggle is to be stupid. And to be stupid is to be worthless, especially in our society with its pressure to “succeed” at all costs. When a text is hard, a student’s first impulse is to find the easy way out: bluff his way through the discussion; check SparkNotes for a summary; ignore the assignment and “forget” to do her homework. The cycle continues, knowledge is lost, and the scaffolding necessary to take the student from novice to expert to virtuoso (Bransford et al) never materializes. The result? Annoyance at the teacher, hatred of the subject matter, and reinforcement of the sentiment “Why try? I’ll just fail anyway.”

The goal, then, becomes one which Salvatori and Donahue address in The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (or as Karen refers to it, TEAPOD). We want to help our students accept that difficulty is a natural part of the learning process (Salvatori 44). That as readers, those moments bring us closer to critical creativity. We want students to “learn to trust the value of their explorations of difficulty, sustained in their efforts by the validation those explorations receive from their teachers and peers” (54).

The students in Elements who “get it” compartmentalize and categorize. According to Bransford and his colleagues (“How Experts Differ from Novices”), they are on the road to expert from novitiate, showing evidence of prior knowledge and experience building a framework to assist in tackling new problems. But ultimately we cannot stop there. We must lead our students to virtuoso status, help them become creative in their approaches to reading and writing. Schulman’s article suggests shifting away from teaching how we were taught, bringing project based assessments and fresh approaches to critical reading (like the difficulty paper) into the classroom. These tactics aid in metacognition (or thinking about thinking) and move the student closer to virtuosity in academia.

To close, I’d like to do a little exercise in metacognition myself (or meta-writing? Is that a word?) I thought this would take me a long time to write as it’s been a year and a half since my last graduate course. I found, though, that once I started, the ideas built one on top of the other. I don’t know if this makes me an expert. But I do know that at least I’m not whining, grunting, then tossing books, pens and balled pieces of paper out of my high chair.

I think that’s a good sign…

Ginny