After reading through several Visible Knowledge Project posters, I’m interested in exploring further the definitions of critical reading given by Sherry Linkon. I’d like to consider how I could better implement the qualities of critical reading as Linkon defines them (inquiry, connectivity, recursivity, self-awareness, and synthesis) in my classroom.

In terms of inquiry, I liked Professor Sample’s suggestion from class last week: instead of highlighting, write a comment or ask a question. When I saw my students on Thursday, I encouraged them to use this technique on their next detective short story. I know from my own experience that highlighting is not nearly as effective as marking questions or summarizing in the margins; when I return to a text, I often forget the reason for my initial highlights. In addition, while highlighting consists of a rather passive interaction with the text, being forced to summarize, question, or comment on the text creates a much more engaged relationship between reader and text.

Since my first student teaching experience, I have been convinced of the effectiveness of connectivity, primarily in sparking interest in a text. Usually, I consider the varying connections that could be made to a certain text, and then consider my current class. Depending on their varying interests and ability levels, I try to find a few connections to focus on; because we do so much reading and writing in English class, I seek out activities that reach what many educational theorists refer to as the “whole student”: music, art, physical activity, etc. For instance, before teaching a novel, I may choose a relatively accessible poem with a similar theme. I read the poem aloud to students several times; while I read, the students use markers or colored pencils to draw their responses. Even though many students do not consider themselves “artistic,” the images they create most often lend themselves to thoughtful discussion.

As I posted in a comment to Francois’ blog, so far I’ve found the difficulty paper to be an excellent tool for creating self-awareness in student reading. It also seems to be a valuable method of recursivity, encouraging students to reread portions of the text. I’d be interested to know if any of you have additional suggestions for student reflection or recursivity that could be adapted to a variety of texts.

To be completely honest, I’m afraid I’m not requiring or encouraging my students to do much in the way of synthesis, at least in terms of combining reading and research. The research we do in my class is somewhat of an island, distinctly separated from the rest of the curriculum. We do one MLA research paper per year, and it doesn’t really connect to the literature we’re studying. I’d like to spend some time this semester developing a plan for making the research process more relevant to my content; perhaps I can use this goal as a starting point for my teaching presentation in this course.

Randy Bass’ post within the Visible Knowledge Project presents two crucial insights into the minds of college readers. The first point that Bass, a leading figure in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SOTL) movement, makes is that students obsess and focus on unclear reading passages. If a certain sentence or section is not immediately clear, students will spend enormous amounts of time attempting to decode that particular area. As a result, many readers will either never finish the rest of the text or they will lose interest in the work entirely.

My experience with college-level readers, particular those in developmental courses, mirrors Bass’ findings. I have noticed students struggle with a single sentence for several minutes. Consequently, they do not finish the reading on time, and they tend to fall behind. Some students will waste a considerable amount of resources and time looking up new vocabulary words when they should focus instead on the text’s overall meaning and value. Once the meaning for that word, sentence or section is clarified, they have no trouble progressing.

This brings up Bass’ second major point about reading: deferral. Teachers should advocate and explain the idea of “deferring meaning” while reading.

Expert readers may not fully grasp each and ever sentence during their first read. However, they are experienced, so they refuse to allow a small element in the work to impede their progress. The importance of the piece’s overall meaning overrides the desire to understand a specific sentence or unknown word. Novice readers operate from the standpoint of a recipe. I find the recipe analogy appropriate because it fits the mindset of many readers. From the novice reader point of view, every sentence and word must be understood as they are encountered if the entire work is to make sense. Recipes must be followed sequentially; therefore, the meaning of a book or essay must be decoded sequentially. The idea of skipping sections and deferring meaning until later seems “dishonest” or “incorrect”.

In my English composition courses, I try to encourage students to skip over difficult areas in a text. As a class, we can always cover these trouble spots later. Novice readers must remember that the first goal in reading is to comprehend the meaning of the text. Vocabulary and bizarre sentence structures can be dissected later. Nonetheless, many of my students refuse to “let go” of the recipe or formula schema. They continue to spend a great deal of energy on individual elements. Coupled with a lack of confidence in their own abilities, this recipe schema undercuts the ability of novice readers to tackle difficult readings. Students must build up confidence by exploring a variety of texts to reassess their approach to reading. Expert readers, on the other hand, tend to skip over sections quickly without consciously acknowledging this activity.

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.