Robb Garner, Week Two Response

I though the definition of reading as a “transaction between reader and text, where both play a role in the construction of meaning,” in Salvatori’s “The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty” was spot-on.  For me, the dynamism of language, how the meaning of words transform through context, use, and association is one of the primary elements of literature’s beauty and power.  I thought Salvatori’s strategy of using difficulty—or more exactly, what a student finds difficult—as an exploratory method of learning was another brilliant moment; it really spoke to my personal pedagogy and my experience as a student.

At university I studied history and philosophy; history required memorizing what I would define as stories (material and relationships) and then processing or defining the meaning of them; philosophy was much more complex and demanding.  Generally speaking, we had 3 essays per class, and we would start each essay by identifying a place in reading or in the discussion where we got lost, a passage we couldn’t quite grasp or a concept we continued to have trouble with.  The essay, then, used what we found difficult to expose what we did know and explore what we didn’t, and in the process evidenced our ability to think and the methodology of our thoughts.

These essays, however, were graded.  In Salvatori’s proposal, responses “are not graded because this work is considered exploratory” (p.10).  I doubt Salvatori is saying that, pedagogically, exploratory writing as a rule cannot be graded, but that seems to be in the implication.  It’s not a direct parallel, as philosophy is its own sort of undertaking, but its relevant enough; in one of my philosophy classes, for example, we spent two whole months working through Robert Frost’s poem “Love and a Question” alone.  I believe in grades and the grades I got for my exploratory writing as an undergrad.  Ungraded assignments tend to receive less effort at every level; grades themselves might be misleading reductions, but they are an essential part of our education, and it seems unwise to quantify some things (thus suggesting that they matter), and to not quantify others (especially when they really seem to be important).  Of course, grading explorations is difficult and is especially demanding on instructors; it isn’t something I imagine could be integrated into most schools.  On top of this, it has the potential to be controversial; at some level it suggests—or could suggest—that some students are better students than others (the explanation of how experts structure, retrieve quickly, and process complex systems of information in the reading “How People Learn” I found to be illuminating not only in the divide between novice and expert but also in a student’s development).  From my experience, I remember taking metaphysics and knowing that, unlike many of my classmates—and unlike other classes—there were things I wasn’t picking up on.  I couldn’t put things together, order them, or retrieve them at will.  I had even more trouble trying to explicate them.  I got Bs and Cs, and my teacher, through his comments, showed me where I was making my mistakes, suggested why I was having trouble processing the material and why I couldn’t utilize the conversations we had in class as I usually could.  It felt good to know my weakness—or “metacognition”—just as working through one’s difficulty, surrounding that difficulty with understanding, and discovering a way through it, or simply exploring the diversion created by it, is a good feeling as well.