Like any fourteen month old, my daughter has had her share of difficulty. Whether the result of realizing she can\u2019t 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\u2019s lap, Gravy (yes, that is one of her nicknames\u2026) 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.<\/p>\n
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, \u201cHey! This is hard!\u201d So back to my original statement \u2013 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, \u201cI don\u2019t get it. It\u2019s too hard.\u201d In my early days fresh out of undergrad, I would screw up my sternest teacher face and ask, \u201cDid you read it?\u201d Yes, they would answer. \u201cDid you try to understand it?\u201d Yes, again. Doubting the veracity of those claims I would plunge them right into the lesson. My, but was I na\u00efve.<\/p>\n
No wonder so many college students hate their high school English classes (as Edith stated in last week\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201csucceed\u201d at all costs. When a text is hard, a student\u2019s first impulse is to find the easy way out: bluff his way through the discussion; check SparkNotes for a summary; ignore the assignment and \u201cforget\u201d 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 \u201cWhy try? I\u2019ll just fail anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n
The goal, then, becomes one which Salvatori and Donahue address in The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty<\/em> (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 \u201clearn to trust the value of their explorations of difficulty, sustained in their efforts by the validation those explorations receive from their teachers and peers\u201d (54).<\/p>\n The students in Elements<\/em> who \u201cget it\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n To close, I\u2019d 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\u2019s 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\u2019t know if this makes me an expert. But I do know that at least I\u2019m not whining, grunting, then tossing books, pens and balled pieces of paper out of my high chair.<\/p>\n I think that\u2019s a good sign\u2026<\/p>\n Ginny<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Like any fourteen month old, my daughter has had her share of difficulty. Whether the result of realizing she can\u2019t 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\u2019s lap, Gravy (yes, that is one of her nicknames\u2026) has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/spring2008\/610\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}