I love Bean’s article, “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts”; his analysis of student writing problems are accurate, in my experience. I especially liked his ideas for helping students understand what they’re reading. Too often, articles point out problems or suggest ideals and give vague one-liners on what teachers are supposed to do to help students. (I feel that the “How People Learn” article was guilty of this).

I also liked Salvatori and Donahue’s article and how it also gave a few examples of tactics to use to help students with difficult texts. I realized that I was sometimes guilty of just spelling it out for my classes when we read texts, especially pieces by Shakespeare. When I read, (forgive me for not couching my quotation), “If [students] move away from those difficulties, or opt for somebody solving them for them, chances are that they will never know the causes of those difficulties, and the means to control them”, I realized that it’s part of my job to let them struggle, just as it is to let my 3 month old struggle to roll over in order to eventually crawl and someday walk and run (3).

I was surprised to be so delighted, though, by Pope’s article. I agree with Alicia; it was definitely a more difficult text to read, especially when you can only find ten minute chunks to read such a formidable text. However, I really loved his ideas. There’s a great balance of creativity with analysis and research in the de/recentring example he uses with Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess”.

By taking a piece of prose/literature/poetry/drama through his text, context, cross-text, re-textualise, and commentary steps, students can understand texts more deeply. The De-Centring and Re-Centring a Literary Classic section starting on page 14 really got me dusting off my teacher brain and imagining how I’d use his techniques for AP English.

As Bean points out, one of the problems students have with reading is they have no prior knowledge. In addition to, perhaps inadvertently, learning how to become new-historicist critics, Pope’s suggestions can help students gain prior knowledge by understanding a text’s contextual underpinnings.

All the articles are very interesting and I gleaned something from each of them, but the main tools that will help students with difficult reading are adequate time to spend on readings, persistence in tackling a text, and intellectual curiosity, which I hope we will discuss more in class.