Scanning through the blogs so far, it seems that everyone liked the posters. I did. As someone who has not yet taught, they gave me relief. I felt as if I had tried and true ideas and directions on how to specifically apply them in the classroom setting.

In keeping with the difficulty paper idea, the suggestions on this page were all about the students teaching themselves and becoming excited as they dig in to what pleases them to pursue. The inquirey project was a great example of that. I liked that Rikki began to falter with her thesis, but because she had the freedom to explore, she was able to connect the dots and then continue on her path. I liked the

 As and avid reader and writer I seek out more information if I do not fully comprehend what I’m reading. I often wish my students would do that as well. I like that these researchers aren’t saying that these methods will create expert readers, but rather each kid will improve. How much they improve to me is irrelevant because there’s growth. I think creating a visual such as the map on the Active and Critical Reading page will allow students to see how they interpret reading and they will grow from that understanding. Often times when readers understand how they read and what’s necessary for the ultimate comprehension, it is easier to target those specific goals. I was particularly interested in the self-awareness part of the map because I never thought to make them aware of their own personal style of reading by specifically asking them to look or at least explore how they read.

The annotation techniques mentioned made me actually feel like I was doing something right by my ESOL classes. As we discussed in class, annotating texts does truly enhance the reader’s comprehension or lack thereof. Annotating a section you don’t understand and attempting to problem solve why it’s confusing is very useful. I always copy entire chapters, poems and plays to allow my students to highlight, question and really read the texts. Though we are not supposed to write in books, I often tell my students to lightly pencil or keep a piece of paper tucked in the text with page numbers and questions if I am not able to make photocopies. I wish I used this method my first couple of years teaching because they actually use annotations to ask questions in class. I now avoid those terrible, generic textbook comprehension questions and turn their questions into meaningful discussions. With my ESOL population or even any population one question is probably the same question for at least another kid in class.

Another example I enjoyed was Arthur Lau’s students that wrote autobiographies to help them better their understanding of reading autobiographies really impressed me. I do think mirroring styles can help students understand important features that differentiate books, poems and stories. Of course I’m not saying there’s one way for any of these, but having an understanding of one or two ways and then having the skill to expand on that knowledge is a powerful tool for any reader or writer. Reading and writing go hand in hand in this respect. Much like Lau, Patricia O’Connor makes her students create web pages that explore the author’s depictions of Appalachian culture and history so that they better understand why the author wrote so accurately about the location. Making these personal connections by having students create their own writing or research author’s methods will allow students to have a better understanding. Literature is multi-faceted as is learning so it makes sense to find a variety of ways for students to connect with the texts they read and understand it as well.

I really enjoyed Sherry Linkon’s Inquiry Project because my colleagues and I often discuss students who just want to know what to do, how to do it, where to look, how many sources and the end result is stale. She said that her students “wanted to know exactly what steps to take in order to find the right answer of the right amount of material,” and that reminded me of our constant struggle to get meaningful research from students. Because research is one of our SOL strands, we often do it because we have to. However, to use research as a matter of literary exploration is a very interesting and exciting concept for me. Linkon said that without requiring it, students were exploring other pieces of literature and research that enhanced the original text they chose.  They not only explored what they didn’t understand, they used that information to enhance their comprehension. I would use this on a smaller scale in my classes. I’m not sure how, but there are great ideas and points she outlined that I know I could use to meet the needs of my students.

Here is the literary narrative poem I mentioned in class.

“A Study of Reading Habits”

When getting my nose in a book

Cured most things short of school,

It was worth ruining my eyes

To know I could still keep cool,

And deal out the old right hook

To dirty dogs twice my size.

Later, with inch-thick specs,

Evil was just my lark:

Me and my cloak and fangs

Had ripping times in the dark.

The women I clubbed with sex!

I broke them up like meringues.

Don’t read much now: the dude

Who lest the girl down before

The hero arrives, the chap

Who’s yellow and keeps the store,

Seem far took familiar. Get stewed:

Books are a load of crap.

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

This may be slightly off-topic…or not. Inspired by Naomi’s post about her son mechanically solving a Rubik’s Cube, I thought of this famous video, of the film director Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), “solving” a Rubik’s Cube with his feet.

What Gondry is really doing, though, is presenting us, much like a detective novel, with a puzzle…

Michel Gondry Solve Rubik Cube With Feet

I haven’t read TEAPOD (tm Karen) yet, and I won’t have read enough by class time to reliably discuss it in this post. No important reason for mentioning that; it’s just that pretending otherwise via omission would make me nervous.

I mentioned in class that I have little experience in the teaching of literature, writing, or any similar subject. What I do have experience in, and where I can see many applications from the readings and from everyone else’s posts, is in athletics. I’ve coached in swimming for several years, and the idea of expertise failing to translate from instinctive understanding to practical application is one I’m familiar with. I know several world-class athletes who—at least in teaching swim lessons to children 5-8—aren’t the equal of 50-year-old matrons who’ve been doing it for a number of years.

To a certain extent teaching inexperience, combined with the wide disconnect in ability, doom the athlete to teach above the child’s level of understanding; however, this tendency also concerns how strategic patterns—those referred to in How People Learn—become instinctive. The expert uses patterns that are superior in quality, if not quantity, to the novice. In swimming, this is because the world-class athlete spends as much as four-six hours in the water daily, with supplemental training on dry land. Sets of varying difficulties are offered to the athlete, and they use their advanced training methods to implicitly plan their approach based on any number of mitigating factors (point in the season, overall physical fatigue, level of mental exhaustion).

But this concerns conditioning, which can only be taught to young children on a limited basis, since their physical maturity hasn’t evolved to the point where it’s useful; in fact, more often than not it’s harmful. Technique is different. Rigorous training schedules don’t just condition; they evolve technical understanding to the point where it becomes habit.

However, this is a habit they’re rarely prepared to explain. And teaching it involves understanding swimming on a level far above the habitual. I believe this level of understanding in sport can be similarly applied to the teaching of literature. It’s not just a matter of experts being poor teachers because they lack a certain pedagogical understanding outside their primary area of expertise; it’s a matter of this primary level of expertise being sub-standard—or insufficient—because they do not have that understanding.

Instinct is imperative in swimming. Constantly thinking about technique would fry the brain and negatively affect the intensity of training. But a metacognitive understanding of how to perform something that was long ago instilled as habit allows the athlete to step back at key moments and solve problems with greater skill. In the middle of a long set they can recognize an involuntarily devolving stroke and autocorrect. It’s like rereading a book or short story and being able to understand different aspects of it in a different context. You read it and glean the same understanding, the same interpretation, but that is supplemented by a different kind of expertise.

Incidentally, I know a lot about swimming and not much about anything else. So prepare yourself for a great deal many athletic references in my posts.

-Matt

Bransford’s piece on Experts Differ from Novices made me analyze my instructors and courses during my undergraduate years. Like Susan and Sara, I too had difficulty with poems. Only I was good at dissecting a poem or story, and giving my peers feedback on their poems, but I never learned to write a poem. I would follow the guidelines my instructors would give on how to construct a certain poem like a sonnet, but I never learned how a poem should feel, sound, and taste. I would complete my poetry portfolios with excellent grades, but I was never satisfied with my poems. The poems my classmates wrote were poetic, and my poems were simple. My peers would give me good reviews me for my grammar and clarity, but nothing on how I can sound poetic. I came to accept that I just did not have the art of writing complex poetry.

The readings however made me realize that maybe the reason I could not write poetry was novice instructors who may have been experts in their fields, but not experts in teaching their fields. I say this because I have had instructors who made me fall in love with a course just by the methods they taught it. For example, I have studied many lessons from different instructors on Shakespeare. But only one instructor in my third year of college made me truly appreciate Shakespeare. He was an expert not only in the subject matter but also in teaching it. The method he used for teaching Shakespeare was very well organized. His interpretation of the text always helped me relate to it in my environment. And thus, I was able to enjoy every minute of the course and excel on the course projects and exams without trouble. The course made me realize that I had not been able to understand Shakespeare because of the methods it was being taught. Many of my previous Shakespeare classes had been so occupied with memorizing dates, names, and chronological events, that it completely took the joy out of learning.

Bransford mentions that not all experts are able to teach their expertise. I therefore realized that not all poets can teach students how to write a poem. When writing a poem I would be constantly checking on the form and the structure, anything that could help me meet the line limit.

Several years ago I began working on a website with a group of students who wrote and critiqued Persian literature, and then translated them into English. When I began editing their translations, at times I was forced to change whole paragraphs so their arguments would make sense in the English language. My peers would get frustrated and ask what was wrong with their translations. They would argue that they had followed all the grammatical rules. They were so used to the patterns that they had studied, that when asked to look beyond their patterns, they were overwhelmed. These students had remained in that first stage of punctuation and hadn’t moved on.

I completely agree with Bransford on how experts in a field who teach, yet are not an expert in teaching can actually harm a student’s ability in learning that study. Similarly a teacher who is not an expert in the course he/she is teaching can also harm a students’ ability to learn.

-Nafiseh

As I read The Norton‘s sketch on plot, I read it as a writer. (Affirming the importance of knowing who and where our students are.) I appreciated the breakdown of the elements of plot because it made me think about the basics of how a story is constructed, created. I finished, and then thought, but let’s say I weren’t a writer interested in teaching writing. Let’s say I were teaching literature for the sake of literature. Why would I want to teach plot to readers? Do they really need to know terms like exposition and discriminated occasion? (Okay, okay, okay… I love to learn. I believe in science for science’s sake, exploration for discovery’s sake, and sometimes, yes, even memorization for knowledge’s sake. But in order to ask something of my would-be students, I need a better grasp of why I’m doing so.)

It’s blog one, paragraph two, and already I need to stop and backup. Before I can really consider my goals in teaching readers about the elements of plot, I need to think more about something much more basic: What am I doing here (in this scenario in which I am teaching literature)? Why do we teach literature? What are we trying to help our students accomplish?

(Blog one, paragraph three, and already I’m straying from the assigned reading.) The Norton tries to explain “Why Literature Matters,” but frankly, the idea that “by becoming familiar with the conventions of writing a sonnet in seventeenth-century England or of writing a short story in 1920s America you can come to appreciate and even love works that you might have disliked if you simply read them on your own” doesn’t really do it for me (3). I can hear the students now: “So your argument is that I should learn this stuff, just so I can appreciate what I might have disliked otherwise? Why not just stick to what I like to begin with and save myself the trouble?”

But literature–reading it, thinking about, talking about it–is one of those things that almost always gets me truly, deeply excited. So what’s The Norton missing here? I view the literature classes from my undergraduate degree as the most important of all the classes I took–not because they relate directly to my career, but because of how they shaped who I am and how I view and think about the world. The Norton touches this idea: “A realistic story, poem, or play can satisfy a desire for broader experiences, even unpleasant experience… We yearn for such knowledge in a very personal way, as though we can know our own identities and experiences only by leaping over the boundaries that usually separate us from other selves and worlds” (2). That is the power of literature, this leaping of boundaries.

At least one reason why we read is the same as why we write: to connect. And this, were I a teacher of literature, would be my goal: to help my students to connect with experiences beyond their own, to reach beyond themselves, to stretch their minds and better understand (themselves, others, life, politics… everything, any thing). (It’s an idealistic goal, but then so is Salvatori and Donahue’s “to make a difference in the world,” xxv).

The Norton explains why students should “bother with any piece of writing that requires … effort,” saying “as we challenge ourselves to read more difficult literature, we become able to extend ourselves further, much like athletes who train for heavier weights or longer jumps with repeated practice” (2). The Norton seems to mean it in terms of becoming intellectually capable of understanding more difficult works, but I want to read the sentence to mean that by reading things that challenge us, we move beyond our own skin, our own experiences–we extend ourselves by engaging in the experiences of the characters.

And simply recognizing and promoting this idea of the value of difficulty is perhaps what I appreciated most about The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. As Salvatory and Donahue discuss, as we extend, we are naturally hindered by what we don’t know as well as by what we know that doesn’t fit in with what we don’t know, and it is in tackling this “difficulty” that we often make the most rewarding discoveries.

And so, finally, back to the question of teaching the elements of plot. Developing a better understanding of how someone else has lent a “meaningful pattern to mere chronology” (58) in the life of their characters can help us leap those boundaries that The Norton talks about. Being able to see, to break down and analyze, the exposition and the discriminated occasion–all the pieces that reveal how an author has intentionally constructed her narrative–can help us not only to better understand the difficulties we have with the text but also to be more cognizant as we shape and lend meaning to the events in the world around us.

I struggled with a topic for this posting because I feel very much like a novice and am well aware that I am only scratching the surface information and have not yet moved to the point where I can apply a higher order thinking to the readings. My saving grace is that my ability to acknowledge my ignorance seems, according to Bransford’s chapter in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, to have the potential to work in my favor, so I’ll try to take heart in that.

Although I imagine that many individuals in the class found the readings in Norton on narration, plot, character development, etc. to be redundant information, I was very grateful that it was required reading. I have not considered these terms much recently and, like the novices discussed in Bransford’s chapter, my “pause time” would have been extended as I searched my memory for those terms and the information associated with them, leaving less time for me to focus on categorizing, or “chunking” information and even less time to begin understanding concepts and making connections between information.

It seems natural to teach information by chunking it, and chunking information seems to be a natural tendency of learners. Watching any child learn his colors demonstrates this. First, he recognizes all of the color words. One week everything will be red. The next week everything will be blue. But, he never points to something to describe the color of it and calls it “three”. “Three” is not chunked with color words.

It seems less instinctive for teachers to teach information by teaching concepts, however, and less instinctive for learners to derive concepts from information. Although in my own education I have had some wonderful teachers who encouraged me to draw conclusions and analyze information, I always thought the goal of my education was for me to learn the content – the capitals of the states, the names of all the presidents, the formula for finding the angle in a triangle-but this is not the knowledge that I apply in my life. In my life it is the concepts of how to learn, how to organize information, how to recognize my ignorance that proves most useful.

All experts start as novices. They all begin by learning the facts. The best teachers I had were not the ones that imparted the most information. They were the ones that taught me that I was capable of grasping more than the surface information, to not give up when I was frustrated and felt like I was never going to “get it” and who didn’t provide me with all the answers, but instead encouraged me to figure things out on my own. Covering content is great, but I don’t think it’s what I want to consider the goal of teaching.

Disclaimer: I’ve been incredibly sleep-deprived the past few days with trying to get all my grades and homework done. So if there are parts of this (or all of it) that don’t seem coherent and don’t make sense, I apologize in advance. It’s just one of those weeks :-)

After reading TEAPOD, I found myself thinking about what I have taught so far this year. The first two things I thought of, and my two major units thus far, were short stories and poetry. I really wish that I had read this book before I started teaching, because it gave me so many great ideas. I know that in undergrad I took a class about teaching reading. However, I seem to be suffering some of Schulman’s amnesia, because I can’t really remember it. I have vague memories of thinking it was geared more toward elementary teachers and making posters with a group, and I can see the text book still sitting on my book shelf, but that’s all I can come up with. If I was taught, the information didn’t stick with me. So with all of this in mind, there are a few things regarding our readings that I would like to address.

I really like the idea that difficulty doesn’t always equal impossibility. In fact, since I read that, I’ve been already trying to incorporate that thought into my classes. I know it hasn’t really sunk in with them, but I hope that it will. I really wish that I had been able to read this before I taught these units. I think I would have been more effective, particularly during the poetry unit. I can’t say for sure that I was ever really taught how to read poetry. It was just something that I found that if I sat and thought about it long enough and read and re-read, I could eventually figure out something intelligent to say. No one ever said, “I want you to think about these things.” Because of that, I really don’t know how to teach my students how to read poetry. In fact, I’d actually forgotten that I was able to do that until I saw “One Art” in the book. As a senior in high school, “One Art” was given to me as my mid-term for AP English. The assignment was to break the poem down and analyze it, then write it in an essay. I ended up with the highest grade in the class because I could take all the pieces apart. I stopped using that skill, and I forgot that I had it. (Amnesia? Yes.) In the past few days, I have been grading their poetry book projects, and when I read their analyses of poems by other authors, I find that it’s a really small percentage who are actually able to pull a poem apart. When asked “what sorts of poetic devices do you see in this poem?” many responded by saying that they used it because they just happened to like that particular poem. That’s it. No rhyme or reason. I have a really hard time trying to convey that aspect of my knowledge to my students.

This brings me to my next point, which may be more like an interjection. TEAPOD said that often times, teachers will have a tendency to teach in the way that we, ourselves, learned. And in the article that we read, there was an example of two English teachers, one of which teaches his ninth graders in the same way that he learned when he was in college. At some point, all of this has applied to me. I have been tempted to try to mime my teachers from high school and college. When I first started teaching, I was still so much in the college frame of mind that I had to almost let the 9th graders break me down before I could get on their level. Once I did, I found that I didn’t need to try to emulate my college professors and their course material. I could relate to my students on my own. Now that I’ve been teaching for a few years, I can’t necessarily say that how I was taught best was and IS the only way.

What I would like to do next year (and I plan to try to somehow incorporate this on a smaller scale into my curriculum for the rest of this year, too), is to have more poems that I go through WITH my students. I want them to really understand that difficulty is a GOOD thing, and not something that should make one ashamed. I want having difficulty to be the cool thing to do (on a good level, of course). I think the difficulty paper is a good idea, and I think giving students the opportunity to interact with the things that are hanging them up is a good way to help them understand what they’re reading on a deeper level.

With that in mind, I’m wondering, what do you do with a student who just absolutely insists that he or she has NO trouble whatsoever with a poem? (And maybe they really don’t, or maybe they’re just suffering from fantasia!)

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.

During the past few days I have had to process some rather difficult family information; after reading several blogs, I feel it appropriate to apply the idea of pleasurable difficulty to my familial turmoil, and thereby, the world outside of literature. Reading has always been a sort of salvation for me, an escape from the difficulty of life; instead of encountering frustration within literature, I often find the “real world” incredibly more complicated. After mulling through my latest domestic crisis, I realize that Salvatori and Donahue might lend of bit of wisdom toward the difficulty of life and literary struggle alike.

As Salvatori and Donahue concur, the necessity of dealing with difficult text accompany many learning experiences, particularly many reading experiences that include processing hearty pieces of literature…or in my case, tough bites of family news that seems to choke me when I’m deep in the middle of grading a stack of month-long overdue essays or, say, composing a blog for graduate school. Digesting a thick bit of literature, whether read once or reread several times, seems quite like the continual cud of turmoil some people (related to me) chew over and over and over…and through genetic ties, I too feel I am digesting the same saliva-coated crises over and over and over.

What’s a reader—or a relative—to do? Learn. Without difficulty, to put it simply, life and reading becomes too clean and tidy—too unlearned. When my students and I get elbow-deep and dirty in a piece of literature, I feel that we appreciate each other and our learning experience with a greater sincerity. Like family, we bond over our shared struggle and surface together, alive and stronger because of our diligence and reverence to difficulty.

Last week’s reading, “Taking Learning Seriously” helped me draw another comparison regarding the analogous difficulty of literature and life. Shulman professes that learning “is least useful when it is private and hidden; it is most powerful when it becomes public and communal” (2). Problems with family—and difficult literature—are best picked, plucked, made public, and hopefully, understood. Or, at the very least, accepted as unsolvable, perhaps pleasurable, slices of learning.

-Jennifer Carter-Wharton

I really enjoyed reading Salvatori and Donahue’s book about Difficulty, because I work with an ESOL population that often struggles with literature in my classroom. Ever since I can remember, I was never allowed to question the text as a learner. My teachers in high school would simply pull vocabulary, define the literary aspects and tell me the themes to look for. If I did not understand, they would simply tell me to look at the notes. I agree with Lauren that Francois’s comment that the text is not necessarily the authoritative final voice, because it’s not. Too many times students want me to tell them the meaning, especially if a text is difficult for them to understand. My students lack the cultural and academic language that is inherent in most American literature. I really feel like I have new ways to encourage them to question the text and realize that difficulty in literature doesn’t mean that the literature is incomprehensible.

I’ve been teaching for six years and I realized that when students don’t understand a word or even a section, they just don’t read it. In the past, especially in my ESOL classes, I encourage them to ignore words they don’t know and move on. We just finished reading In the Time of the Butterflies. At the beginning of our unit too many students would get hung up on a word or innuendo they didn’t understand and completely ignore the basic message from each speaker. After much frustration, I finally decided we need to have a discussion page by page for the first chapter. We summed up the overall message or point in the plot after each page. This was a bit tedious, but at the same time it showed them they didn’t need to understand each word to understand the plot. We did have times when we had to go back because some phrases or references were essential for the understanding of where the book was headed, but that was ok. I let them know that the book would be difficult for them. When reading, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, I really liked when the author acknowledged that, “expert teachers know the structure of their disciplines, and this knowledge provides them with cognitive roadmaps that guide the assignments they give students, the assessments they use to gauge students’ progress, and the questions they ask in the give and take of the classroom life (143). I feel that asking them to note the difficulties and determine how to handle them allows the students to learn better. I’m not saying I’m am expert teacher but when I read this I did think about why I do what I do in the classroom and I suppose I never thought about how much the mind works as an adult to assess a situation and attempt a solution. In my case, I base my lessons on my students. They change every year. I keep the content the same, but I also omit lessons that I know will not benefit my students. I think from now on all my students can benefit from realizing they don’t need to comprehend everything in a work to have a good understanding of the work.

After this activity they felt comfortable reading knowing they could understand the text. To understand any literature word for word would require an entire semester or year of intense study. Even then most of the archaic literature we are asked to teach cannot be verified because most authors aren’t alive to clarify meaning. My students feel comfortable knowing that they do not need to know each phrase to come up with their own understanding of the text. Also, they know that if they explain to me their understanding, I accept their opinions. The bottom line is that they know it’s hard and they do their best to understand it. I think it’s my job as a teacher to facilitate their questions and difficulty with text and I like the idea that they should embrace difficulty and I think they do now.

I would be curious to know who her audience was as well. Lauren clarified a bit, but I couldn’t find Salvatori’s essay, “Difficulty: The Great Educational Divide,” so I’m not sure if the book is directed toward beginning readers, second language learners or people who like to read, but I do think it’s nice that someone is saying that texts are difficult. Too many people ridicule themselves if they cannot understand a word or some ambiguous metaphor so I really liked that this book allows people to be human. This book and the sections of How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School really made me rethink how I teach. After a bit teachers get stale so it’s always good to learn new methods and create new meaning for learners.

The Elements and Pleasures of Difficulty jived nicely with our discussion in class.

I just watched a snippet of The Paper Chase, a movie from the ‘70s about law school, and laughed when the professor tells his students that he will ask questions and they will answer. He states that they should not ever think they are correct in their answers or done with an answer as there will always be another question. And through this process, he drones, you will teach yourself.

I think that more than a test or a “put you on the spot” classroom setting would, the difficulty papers not only assess each student’s progress, but they provide a safe place for students to delve into the learning process with transparency in a way that is not embarrassing or promoting judgment. They allow for the student and teacher to stand back and observe learning calmly.

On page 43, the author describes how a confused student trusts her analysis. She realizes that her reactions came from the piece. The student also spent time looking up definitions and experimenting with the piece she had been reading. In my experience this sort of dickering in the learning process exists only in a very safe emotional place, far from tests and graded work; it comes up in hobbies.

The clues as to what responses such as “boring” may mean struck a cord with me. Long difficult pieces are off-putting. Cleaning your garage is off-putting. It is the overwhelming aspect of, “what the heck do I do with this?” that makes it frustrating. It is the moving around of things and the revisiting of the same unresolved questions. The journals act as a finger in the pages. They provide staging areas for unknowns or as the authors put it a “safety net”.

I think that the result of the difficulty papers would be a sense of accomplishment as the student came up with what he needed for a final paper on his own, no prompt required. I think that shows respect for the student. It reduces the need for tedious outlining and instead focuses the student on those elements of the piece that would be difficult and therefore interesting to think and write about. I really enjoyed the book and the ideas presented.

I’m knew to this blogging and forgot to write my name at the bottom of the piece. Susan

I introduced this concept of embracing difficulty to the seven sixth- grade girls that comprise my book club. While distributing their books, I told them to write down (either in the book since it’s theirs to keep or on paper) any words, passages, dialogue that are confusing or not understandable. (This week I’ll borrow the words “strange moment”). One girl responded that any hard part is usually skipped over, which I already knew from experience. So the first step then in teaching reading is to allow both time and opportunity to the students to explore or dissect their reading, and possibly this habit of skipping over will vanish. Unfortunately, teachers don’t necessarily have this time, especially in elementary school, where time/effort is more focused on SOL preparation. Yet this is the place where students are introduced to poetry and literature. Plus that’s only part of understanding texts; according to Salvatori and Donahue (ch.1) what previous knowledge the student can bring to his reading will not only determine whether the text is deemed easy or hard, but will affect his capability to make inferences. With such diversity in the schools this could compound things, especially when idioms are used.

Whether a student is an abstract or concrete thinker can further affect their ability to see the author’s intent. I find this is very true for me when I read poetry. I take the words for their literal meaning and fail to see the nuances. So I guess for some readings I’m still at the novice level! Which leads me to the article on experts and novices. I feel that my kids primary education is being shortchanged because they are being crammed with loads of information but on a superficial level. What good is all this info if the kids can’t process, manipulate, and apply what’s being taught? How much info becomes inert vs. simply forgotten? (Let me know if my ranting on the current system/methods gets to be a bit much…I find the public education curriculum to be “academically rigorous” and at times not developmentally appropriate).

Professor Sample posed the question of whether these articles intersect. I feel that they do. While the book focuses on understanding and resolving difficulties (or obstacles) novice students encounter, the article explains the hows and whys these difficulties occur, and clarifies the processing system between the two. Now the style in which the book was written was fairly technical, mixing in some educational terms, and focusing more on secondary and beyond students. Although I realize the information can be adapted for younger students. But the further I read, the slower I had to go. The reading became more tedious and at times seemed redundant. I would have liked to have heard more stories of their earlier teaching experiences/mistakes.

As for the sketches, they not only provided definitions but also gave insight and credibility to the difficulty papers provided in chapter 4. For example, Susan Connelly wrote that when reading prose, the author provides everything. In plot, a typical arrangement for action is used, so the reader creates expectations….just like Susan did. Unfortunately, texts aren’t always so tidy in form. Under main theme, it says to ask questions to yourself and engage in exploration, hence the need for difficulty papers or something similar. (It kind of reminds me of economics class, all those flow charts).

In reading Cathedral, I jotted comments that could be used in a Difficulty Paper. Doing so allowed me to see how many times the husband used certain words, pronouns, or expressions which helped form possible meanings. It also aided in recognizing symbols, being the concrete thinker that I am. But I close in knowing that both novices and experts can often be confused/puzzled/perplexed when it comes to figurative language.

To quote one of Salvatori’s student texts, I found reading The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty extremely difficult.” Well perhaps not extremely, but difficult. So to utilize the Salvatori’s instructions, I will create a difficulty paper in which I catalog the difficulties, explain why I found those points difficult, and then explore what I can learn from those points.

To begin, I found the writing style itself to be difficult. The numerous parenthetical insertions that did little more than rename (explain) the previous (preceding) word were distracting (off-putting), especially for a composition instructor who is always red-penciling (commenting on) student essays that commit (contain) that particular onerous (tedious) mistake. The text also seemed to jump from place to place and idea to idea with little or no connection joining the thoughts. There are two possible explanations for this difficulty: Salvatori is a poor writer, or she had a purpose for this style. Accepting that the difficulty is with the text and not with me, I will also accept that there is a reason for this presentation. Actually there may be two. Perhaps this is the style of writing that would appeal to Salvatori’s intended audience of beginning readers. It is also possible that by giving students a “difficult” text to deal with, Salvatori is giving them a non-literary text on which to practice the skills that she discusses within the pages of the book. This was certainly the effect on me as evidenced that I have chosen the format of a “Difficulty Paper” in which to discuss the book.

The second difficulty I perceived was the content of the discussion. The idea of embracing difficulties rather than avoiding or denying them seems a very basic idea that Salvatori discusses ad infinitum from the perspective of different genres. This almost brought the book to the point of “long and boring” texts. Conversely, there also seemed much that was left out of the text. What level were these students? How far along in the semester were they? What experience did they have before enrolling in this course? What prompts had Salvatori given in preparation for this assignment. Were these students typical or atypical? For the answers to these questions, I turned to “Difficulty: The Great Educational Divide,” a shorter, earlier version of the book. This essay describes the case study in with which Salvatori began her research for the dealing with difficulty in the classroom. This essay explains much of what is left out of the longer text. So here I guess I learned the value of making connections between readings.

My final difficulty is the one that gave me the most trouble. I had difficulty relating to the proposed audience of this text. There were references to “students such as yourself” that really seemed to make the reading intangible for me. This issue was finally resolved when I realized that Salvatori was not really addressing students like “me.” She was addressing beginning readers. By this I do not mean to elevate myself to the level of an expert. However, Salvatori’s projected audience is definitely different than the one I am trying to be a part of. When I finally placed myself in the skin of a beginning reader the book began to make sense, and the other difficulties resolved themselves. Finally, I had taken the step Salvatori wanted me to. I had embraced a difficulty, wrestled with it, and thereby gained a better understanding of the text in question.

While I did not complete all the exercises that Salvatori gave the students throughout the text, I did practice these steps on the contents of the book itself. I found it to be an interesting exercise to be frustrated by a text, something that does not happen very often for me. Yet this frustration with a simply written piece of prose exemplifies the very idea of Salvatori’s work. This is possibly something that I could not have experienced from reading a piece of “literature” because I have dealt so often with those “difficulties.” While Salvatori’s concept seems simple on the surface, it is a revealing exercise to practice.

Edith

Tags: difficulty, salvatori, reading

As I sat down to write my weekly response, I found myself at a loss for words. This rarely happens. I’ve always been an easy conversationalist and prolific writer. I am usually one of the most talkative students in any classroom. (So often have I been “that girl”). So, why should a 500-word response piece provoke such anxiety?

It’s not that I’m unused to being a student. Though this is my first class in the TWL program at GMU, I’ve spent the past few years taking undergraduate literature and writing courses, both at NOVA and at GMU, first as an exploration of personal interests, and later in preparation for an M.A. in English.

Nor is this an issue of the graduate/undergraduate divide. I’ve taken graduate-level courses on a variety of subjects—from quantitative political analysis to feminist theory. Don’t get me wrong, these classes were indeed challenging. And yet, somehow, even more objectively “difficult” assignments seemed simpler.

Salvatori and Donahue’s comments on students’ repertoires shed light on my sense of anxiety. Likewise, Bransford’s discussion of novices and experts helped me make better sense of my own educational background and the hesitancy with which I approached this seemingly simple assignment.

The entirety of my high school and undergraduate education prepared me for these higher-level courses. To use the terminology introduced in this week’s readings, in previous settings, my repertoire was such that when confronted with new formulas or concepts, I knew where to fit them in to the “big picture.” I understood how to order and “chunk” new information. Now, I would never claim to be an “expert” in American political science. However, I do have the relevant experience to “recognize meaningful patterns of information” and use this knowledge to demystify new material (Bransford 37). That is, at least in the realm of political science.

Although I work in an educational subfield, I have limited knowledge of pedagogical theory. I find myself, much like the students featured in Salvatori and Donahue’s The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, surrounded by new terminology, new vocabularies, and new ways of thinking about learning and the learning process. By virtue of proximity to so many experienced educators (at work and in class), I do recognize a name there (Bloom’s!) or a term there (constructivist!). Still, in the context of this new material, I find myself identifying more with the struggling students in Salvatori and Donahue’s work much more than even the “novice” educators discussed (albeit briefly) towards the end Bransford’s “Learners and Learning.”

After mulling this over (and managing 500 words in the process), I find myself much more at ease with this glut of new information. The most elucidating aspect of this week’s readings was, without a doubt, Salvatori and Donahue’s discussion of “Why Difficulty Merits Attention.” Many students (and teachers for that matter) connote ease with intelligence. I’ve certainly done this myself. If you’re “smart,” you “get things” more easily, right? Salvatori and Donahue’s comments on accepting and even cherishing difficulty helped me better address my own anxieties about facing new material.

As a side note: I also enjoyed Bransford’s discussion of experts and teaching. Having attended a large state school for my undergradate degree (Go ‘Hoos!), I’ve had one or two professors who were brilliant academics but just could not communicate ideas to entry-level students, despite earnest efforts from both student and teacher.

Thank God for teaching assistants.

Sara

I found the research on the differences between experts and novices very interesting. As I read, the marginal notes I made were simply names of people I was reminded of. For example, the opening sentence says experts “are able to think effectively about problems” in the area of their expertise. This reminded me of Stephen Goodwin here at GMU. Others of you may have had a class with him, and I was amazed (and jealous) by his skill in identifying problems with my writing. Things I never saw jumped out at him as if they were in neon lights. That experts understand problems in terms of “big ideas” whereas novices mechanically work formulas reminded me of my son, who learned over Christmas break how to solve the Rubik’s cube by finding the solution on the internet and practicing the algorithms until he could do them without looking at his cheat sheet. These two examples lead me to wonder how one moves from novice to expert.Though expertise is much more than the memorization of a set of facts, certainly the fundamentals lay a necessary foundation for any area of expertise. As a teacher of reading and writing, I have mastered the basics, so how do I move to the next level? Is the big difference between Goodwin and me simply years of experience? Given enough time, would my son eventually master the 4-square Rubik’s cube in terms of “big ideas” on the workings of the puzzle? The chapter ends by asserting that, ultimately, students must learn to teach themselves. I am thinking it takes a certain level of expertise to recognize when one is at that level.

Another related question is how I can be the guide my students need to move them from manipulation of formulas to understanding big ideas. I do not want to teach them that to write well, they must memorize a set of facts such as punctuation rules and sentence structures. But I do not want them to miss out on learning the fundamentals. Since I am a novice writer myself, my ability to guide them is limited. I can, however, point them to the big ideas I have learned regarding voice, passion, purpose, and audience. I am compelled by my commitment to my students to acquire more expertise both in pedagogy and my discipline.

The concluding paragraphs pointed out a couple cautions regarding the application of this study. As I read the importance of the interaction of the six principle differences explained in the chapter, I smiled in amusement. The experts on this subject noticed problems I never would have thought of.

The three student epigraphs that begin Chapter 2 of our Difficulty text acknowledge that poetry “is a particularly difficult genre for many students to read” (Salvatori & Donahue, p. 15). Like those students, I’ve never considered myself to be a capable reader of poetry. I, too, have been taught few tools for reading poetry and have had little poetry reading practice. This is an astounding revelation for someone who has both undergraduate and graduate degrees in English. My literature studies focused almost exclusively on short stories, novels, and plays. Why is that?

Thinking back to my undergraduate days, I see that my very small amount of poetry study didn’t resemble the reading activities Salvatori and Donahue describe. My instructors lectured about the poems we read and the poets who wrote them. I remember a particularly dismal course in which we studied Paradise Lost and all I can recall is being in pain. The instructor allowed for some discussion, usually dominated by only a few students. I felt there was something wrong with me and zoned out during these discussions. It never occurred to me that Milton is difficult. It didn’t seem to be that way for my instructor or for my few classmates who spoke up.

I don’t remember being taught strategies to approach the difficulty in poetry. I was taught no system of notation like the one Salvatori and Donahue describe on page 19-20. Yes, I was taught to identify similes and metaphors and can do so. However, I wasn’t taught how to use those those similes and metaphors, once identified, to help me tackle the difficulties in the poems.

Here’s the difficulty in my own story; I write poetry. And I work hard at writing it, sometimes spending weeks revising a short poem. Now, why would someone who doesn’t consider herself to be a good reader of poetry (and who has generally avoided reading poetry) write poetry, poetry she finds difficult to write?

To begin, I’ve had far more writing poetry instruction than reading poetry instruction. I took a creative writing class in college in which I produced a collection of poems. My instructor gave me many good ideas for poetic form and highlighted words, phrases, and lines of my poems for me to consider more deeply. Her astute observations and excellent suggestions helped me push to find just the right word or eliminate the unnecessary. She taught me that writing good poems is difficult and that’s my expectation to this day.

I’ve also gotten very positive feedback about the poems I write. In that course, I shared my poems with my classmates and remember enjoying their praise. I’ve had a few poems published — something that makes me proud. I wrote an elegy and read it at a funeral and many people told me how much it meant to them and how beautiful it was. I’ve also written song lyrics (and music) for several area schools now using them, including the university where I teach.

I’ve had instruction and reinforcement for writing poetry but little for reading poetry. I’ve believed that reading poetry wasn’t my thing and that difficult poems are beyond me – a defect in my abilities. I see now that I’ve been lacking the tools, encouragement, and opportunity I needed to be a good reader of poetry. Now, I wonder if I might actually enjoy reading poetry and be good at it. — Laura Hills

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