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

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