Edith, I too had difficulty with The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. True it was not in itself a difficult text, but I would have liked to have had some more information regarding the authors’ students and some more quantifiable data regarding those students’ performance. It could have also been about half as long. By the time I got to the “Intermezzo”, I had the idea. Some of what the authors bring to light is interesting and I plan to employ the “Difficulty Papers” with my next unit as my students are beginning work on Hamlet. I, however, was less than impressed with their use of three column notes – they just did not seem intuitive. I have used two and three column notes both as a teacher and a student and found them to be useful tools, but I just did not care for their passing reference to them at the end of each chapter, nor for their textual layout in the first chapter. For me, I found them more confusing than helpful.

I did enjoy the chapter “How Experts Differ from Novices”. Although I was also outraged at some of the information provided. I mean, I did not find a source cited with a date after 1997 (Yes, I realize that they book was published in 1999) and yet we have not seen many changes in our educational system. The “mile wide and an inch deep” curricula still exist. Not to mention the fact that little is being done about conditionalizing the knowledge that is being taught in our classrooms, and Whitehead noted that this leads to “inert” or useless information back in 1929. (I had said a lot more on this point before my computer crashed, but I now realize that it was useless fluff and will not go through the process of trying to reconstruct it now.)

The other point that I got a kick out of in this chapter was key principle #5 – just because you’re an expert doesn’t mean that you can teach what you know. A key example of this is one of my best friends Eric. Arguably the most intelligent person I have ever met. He became great at teaching the undergraduates at M.I.T. but not so wonderful at imparting lasting knowledge to his students at a highly under funded, ill-equipped high school on the Navajo Nation. He tried, but he just couldn’t bring his mind down to the level that it needed to be at to converse with his students.

“Cathedral” is an amazingly complex, simply difficult story seeped in religious symbolism.

So, how do all these reading intersect? Well, as I see it, it goes something like this. The book chapter reminds us that we are experts and that we have spent a lot more time than our students getting to the point that we are as readers. We don’t always remember how it was that when it rains in a story that we are on the look out for a cleansing, or why we automatically begin to think old age if the season is fall, or why we expect that the sighted character is actually going to learn that they are ‘blind’ in someway through their interaction with a blind character. It is a lot like being able to recall the chess moves, it just happens with all the practice that we have gotten. The book on difficulty serves to remind us that texts are difficult and we need to 1) remember this about them and 2) listen to our students when they tell us that they find them difficult. And not just to the fact they are difficult, but why they are difficult – this gives us as teachers the opportunity to differentiate, to meet every learner at his or her level and help them work through the difficulty and then show them how to work through these difficulties on their own. And lastly, “Cathedral” gives an example of the practice in action. The narrator is trying to teach Robert what a cathedral looks like, but is at a lose for how to accomplish this task until he listens to his student who gives the ‘teacher’, the tools necessary to teach him. The end result – they both learn, and I would argue that the narrator learns the most.