Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori and Patricia Donahue’s The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty is a useful window into the minds of undergraduate readers. However, the author’s discussion of The Education of Henry Adams and Shakespeare’s Othello are particularly relevant to my experience as reader. As an undergraduate, I was forced to read both texts in various courses. Salvatori and Donahue’s description of the average reader’s reaction to the text mirrors my experiences as well.

In the case of The Education of Henry Adams, I distinctly remember using the words “long” and “boring” to describe the text. Although the text is an autobiography, Adams routinely uses the third person point of view. Combined with some rather lengthy sentences and unusual sentence patterns, the third person perspective made this text rather dull when I was an undergraduate. Salvatori and Donahue’s suggestion about writing a “difficulty paper” and exploring the reasons for my reaction would have been an interesting and enlightening experience. Ironically, the course that assigned the reading was a senior seminar English class that served as a capstone for the whole program. It would have been an ideal course for critically assessing the effectiveness of the text using concrete examples and analysis. Unfortunately, the course emphasized the text’s overall form within the autobiographical genre. Before class, most of the students would talk about the text being “long and boring”. As Salvatori and Donahue advocate, writing and discussing these difficulties within the class itself would have served as a useful analytical tool and possibly provided some solutions to the dilemma.

Shakespeare’s Othello was another assigned reading during my undergraduate experience. While a great deal of the vocabulary and terminology was alien to me at the time, I did not let the issue impede or slow my reading of the text. As Salvatori and Donahue point out about English majors, I was ignoring “what did not make sense” and moving on through the rest of the text (103). A quick glance at the text’s footnotes would usually reveal some of the definitions when it became necessary. The key point here is counter-intuitive. Few teachers firmly advocate the idea of skipping over confusing text to ascertain the overall meaning. For many students, the thought of ignoring words or lines may seem dishonest or insulting. Nonetheless, most experienced readers and writers ignore certain pieces of text and only return to them if they are curious or believe them to be vital the work as a whole. I always tell my classes to avoid getting stuck at any one point in a reading. It’s important to move on and understand the entire piece rather then spend several minutes figuring out an odd sentence or two.

As a teacher of English composition at a community college, I do not cover a great deal of literature. However, the class does respond to several short readings. One of the most useful discussions over a reading involves the text’s accessibility or difficulty. I make it clear that the text is not necessarily the authoritative final voice in the discussion. If the class finds flaws in the content or layout of the reading, we will explore it either in small writing groups or orally. I find that this exercise empowers students with the confidence necessary to approach new readings. In particular, developmental or “remedial” English students gain the most from this activity. Often, they are intimidated by unknown vocabulary and complex sentence patters. Once the students begin breaking down the text and analyzing it, they begin to realize that few texts are truly inaccessible.

During my staff development days last August, I participated in a workshop on teaching students difficult texts. That experience prompted me to spend significant time and energy this year focusing on, in the workshop presenter Kelly Gallagher’s words, creating “deeper readers.” The concepts Gallagher shared with me and my fellow teachers directly connect to this week’s readings, particularly The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty (TEAPOD) and “How Experts Differ From Novices,” by recognizing the importance of teaching students to embrace difficulty while demanding that they think more critically.

While reading TEAPOD, I immediately began questioning: How exactly can I incorporate Salvatori and Donahue’s methods into my classroom? Because it seems apparent that students cannot successfully embrace difficulty without first developing some level of self-awareness, I decided to focus first on helping my readers, 10^th grade English students, determine their “repertoires.” The authors’ word choice to describe students’ prior knowledge and skills appeals to me because, unlike much educational jargon, “repertoire” has an artistic, edgy sound to it that I think many of my students would like to identify with. It has undertones of musicality, talent, the makings of an engaging performance. I imagine the word, slipped into our daily blackboard agenda, will at the very least pique my students’ curiosity, and could even go so far as to generate some enthusiasm for what will hopefully be an effective reading strategy.

Though the authors suggest establishing students’ repertoires through poetry analysis, I am approaching a unit on detective fiction; therefore, I’ve decided to start where I am. So instead of having students question and reflect on their beliefs about poetry, I will ask them to do the same exercise with detective fiction: What experiences have they had with mystery stories as a child? A teenager? Did they love watching Scooby Doo reruns and always finger the Red Herring? Have they consumed page-turner mysteries as summer beach reads, watched Saturday marathons of Law & Order SVU, or seen any Agatha Christie film adaptations? Did they watch Murder, She Wrote with their grandmothers? (No, that was me…). Do they posses powers of intuition and reasoning similar to the best detectives? Are they keen observers? You get the idea… . Responding to such questions will allow students to start examining their prior assumptions, expectations, and emotions; my hope is that by considering all of these, we can eliminate some of the barriers to engaged, critical reading that would have otherwise developed.

With this newfound awareness, my students will tackle The Difficulty Paper as discussed in TEAPOD, reflecting their struggles in the Poe short story I’m assigning to them. I’m eager to see how this level of meta-cognition affects their readings, and if it immediately lends itself to a deeper understanding of the text. Because many students are accustomed to answering primarily literal, plot-based questions on a first read, I’m interested to see the results of their reflections. My students will be completing those papers in the coming week, so I’ll keep you posted on their progress…

Karen Goldman