Since I had originally been excited about the Difficulty Paper, but was disappointed with my experience with it, I thought I’d share with everyone some more informal reflections on my experience with it as a reader/writer.
Pros
- Helps with difficult texts
- Good heuristic–it provides places for further investigation (helping to get over that blank slate block)
- Engages you with the text, makes you look closer
- Solves problems you may otherwise gloss over
- It is rewarding to solve difficult difficulties
Cons
- Engages you with stumbling blocks rather than your interests
- Some difficulties are less valuable than others
- Solving less difficult difficulties, such as simple misreads, isn’t that rewarding
- May be forcing a method of addressing difficulty that is more time consuming than what more advanced readers do naturally (In some ways, this is good. It forces you to slow down and look closer, but it is annoying).
Truthfully, as I was writing it, I did not really see these cons. I dove in and pressed on to see where it would take me. Even though a couple of the difficulties that I discussed were very easily solved, I found that my discussion went to why those elements of the story were important, which led to a deeper understanding of the text than merely solving the surface difficulty.
It was only in a revision of my reflection paper, when I was trying to hone in on its guiding idea, that I realized my annoyance with the Difficulty Paper. I wasn’t as excited about my paper as I normally am. I think this was because of con number 1. When you choose a topic, you generally choose something that you have a personal connection/interest in. As you develop your thesis, you naturally have to solve difficulties. However, they are difficulties related to something you are interested in and want to pursue rather than whatever random things tripped you up while you were reading.
So my conclusion is that the difficulty paper is good for helping students learn to address difficulties and for initial engagement in the text, but for final products such as this, where they are going to be putting in more concentrated time and effort, it might be best if they can pursue something they find engaging and compelling rather than “difficult.”
Thanks for your super-meta-hyper-reflections on the difficulty paper. Your conclusions confirm what we’ve said before: the difficulty paper, like any of the other methods we’ve explored, should be thought of as just one tool among many. It may provide an effective entry into a particularly difficult poem or shorter text, but it might not always serve as the basis for a more formal examination of a text.
Your comments also suggest that, to borrow from George Orwell, all difficulties are difficult but some are more difficult than others. That is, some difficulties are more worth pursuing than others. We can’t always assume that just because something is difficult that it is also interesting, or at least interesting to us.
Yeah, I’m really glad I did it rather than a more formal paper. For the purposes of this class, it was much more enlightening. Like so many things, it’s one thing to read and summarize and argue (in this case, through our blogging and discussion about the TEAPOD), and yet another to actually experience the subject matter first hand.
In my head, I had summarized the difficulty paper with difficult = challenge = rewarding. I have a tendency to be rather idealistic. So it’s always good to try something out and really cement in my head where a particular tool I’m excited about would and would NOT be useful. =)