It seems that the continuity between this weeks reading is the struggle to overcome challenges in understanding, particularly with reading, but as the essay. “Cathedral,” exemplified, this struggle to understand can extend to other elements in life. “Engaging Ideas” provided a groundwork to the concept of how to assist struggling learners, what causes difficulty in reading and what methods to explore to assist those with difficulty. Following that article with the above mentioned “Cathedral” allowed for a hilarious break. The obvious egocentrism of the speaker, coupled with outright ignorance allowed for a bit of comic relief, specifically the slapstick-like description of the blind man’s random eye movements. This article seemed more appropriate for a reading methods exercise, but the conclusion revealed another teaching method, working together and guided learning by struggling though something unfamiliar and difficult. The officers success, directed by the blind man’s questions and supporting comments, made for an effective segue to the third article, “Introducing Difficulty.” The premise of learning through struggling resounded with the previous essay.
One particular quote stood out to me, “Nobody, not even a genius, knows without having learned to know” (Salvatori and Donahue 3). This line would serve as a helpful reminder to any student, those who are struggling and those who work with ease. The reminder of past struggles adds value to the skills acquired, and the affirmation that even the “genius” had to work hard validates the struggling learners efforts. One strategy which stands out is to have students write out their difficulties, enabling them to “acknowledge the complexity of reading” (Salvatori and Donahue 5). This seems like a reasonable exercise for me to implement with my 9th grade students, considering the frequent difficulties they had with the Odyssey. I am curious to see how  they express their difficulties.
In contrast to the above readings, Pope’s “Textual Interventions” seemed more like an exercise in not reading for detail. The density of the writing made it comparable to a scientific research paper; an item which, according to “Engaging Ideas,” should not be read for detail, rather skimmed over for general ideas. The 46 page document may have been better served as a bulleted list as the distracting examples provided little assistance in comprehension. The proposed instructional plans, presented in a conversational tone, were interesting, and inspired several ideas for my own classroom, but the format of presentation still irked my sensibilities for what qualifies as appropriate literature; “Now firm up…Then turn…Don’t draft…Do this…” all could be plainly outlined in a structure more accessible than an essay (16). Despite my reservations regarding the structure of this piece, it does present some lesson ideas worthy of further, in depth, review.
The final article, “How Experts Differ from Novices,” seems to conclude a simple sentiment, experts are capable or reasoning and solving difficulties due to their experience and training in a particular field. This sentiment nicely returns us to the earlier article, “Introducing Difficulty.”

I’m moved by the connection between Bean’s “Teaching Students to Read…” and Salvatori and Donahue’s “The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty.” In my classroom, students often regard a difficult passage, assignment, or question, as a kind of institutional hazing effort rather than an earnest learning opportunity. The morning after a difficult reading task, when I solicit reactions from the group, I often get responses like: “Why would you give us such a hard article?” OR “This didn’t make any sense.” OR “I couldn’t get past the first two pages.”  Part of this struggle to work with difficult texts is, as Bean mentions in Engaging Ideas, that our students are highly efficient, and seek economy during study time (“how little can I read and still get an A?”). But I also agree with the idea that Bean and Salvatori/Donahue assert, which is that many novice readers see struggle as a marker of their own incompetence rather than a normal obstacle in any reader’s process.

As a Comp 101 instructor, I’m very interested in the way my students read. Not just because good readers make good writers, but because many of the texts I assign in the class require “deep reading,” or ask students to think about how the text is constructed, rather than merely what it says (Bean, 163). I introduce “Reading Like A Writer,” (a really accessible article by Mike Bunn) early in the semester. I often assign “Says/Does” charts and “Reverse Outlines” to help students ask questions or think about the structure of an article as they read. I often have students profile the audience, or describe the rhetorical context of the piece to place it in the larger conversation. I regularly model the use of graphic organizers as a way of reflecting on texts. I also often talk about my own process as a reader.  But something I don’t do (yet) is talk to students about what difficulty should mean in a college course. Salvatori and Donahue cite the example of Kim Woomer’s conclusions about difficulty, and watch her work to understand that difficulty is an obstacle rather than a road block (4). This is something I’ll ask my students to think about as we begin reading more difficult texts—in Composition, and in my future Literature courses. Why is reading sometimes difficult? What would make it easier? Is it necessarily supposed to be easy? What can I do to help? Challenging some of these preconceptions may help students get on board with a difficult text, and may simultaneously help them feel comfortable (instead of incompetent) as novice readers.

I should mention that I STILL shy away from difficult passages (I struggled through Pope’s “Textual Intervention” for this week, and I’m never amused when an MFA prof puts a text like “Ulysses” on the syllabus—and allots a week to read it). I see this as normal. But something I do worry about is how to help readers who develop something akin to Shulman’s fantasia? That is, readers who, in an attempt to “translate [meanings] into ideas that they are comfortable with,” end up misinterpreting a text’s goal, or on the more basic level, a text’s information (165). It’s these students I struggle most to redirect. It feels as though I correct their misinterpretations in class, but don’t push them to determine why/how they came to their incorrect conclusions in the first place. This is absolutely something I plan to spend more time thinking about as I move towards teaching Literature next fall.

I found the “How People Learn” chapter, “How Experts Differ from Novices,” to be very interesting in its examination of experts’ abilities to find key patterns and “chunk” important information – concepts that are certainly indispensable, but not new to me. However, the part of the chapter that discussed the different ways experts exhibit flexibility (or not) in their approach to new situations was a bit of an eye opener. The ideas of placing an emphasis on adaptive expertise and the value of metacognition serve a classroom teacher exceedingly well. It’s not enough to know the subject inside out or to be well-versed in pedagogy. It is the melding of these two concepts – and the inclusion of the instructor within the continual learning process – that, in my opinion, represents a great classroom environment.

When I was reading this piece, it put me in mind of my first “Career Switchers” teacher training class. I was accepted into the program by passing the Praxis II and as a function of my 25+ years of experience in writing, editing and professional communications. However, beyond my participation as an instructor in a number of creative writing workshops and my role as an active volunteer in my kids’ schools and as an Odyssey of the Mind coach and judge, I had little experience as a teacher. As we went around the room for our perfunctory introductions, the program leader asked us to share what had prompted us to enter the program. Most of the students said they loved to work with kids, or loved teaching.  Just a couple of us explained that it was a love of our subject (in my case, literature and writing).  I started to wonder which was more important – loving a subject and bringing the accompanying knowledge and enthusiasm to students, or developing proficiency in the teaching practices that help kids learn the things on which they will be evaluated. The easy answer is that both are important, but in fact, they may get in the way of each other.

As the chapter points out, the combination of passion and pedagogy in its best practice goes hand-in-hand with adaptive expertise, where the expert (instructor) can continually evaluate the approach to a given problem or interpretation, including in the ways he/she attempts to reach students and address their unique learning styles. As the authors quote Shulman: “… pedagogical content knowledge is not equivalent to knowledge of a content domain plus a generic set of teaching strategies; instead, teaching strategies differ across disciplines” (45).  As the example (Box 2.4) so nicely shows, it is easy to get wrapped up in one’s love of subject, to the detriment of learning. A better practice is to evaluate one’s approach based on where you know your students are (intellectually, developmentally) and to come to them on terms they can understand and expand upon – with all the passion you can muster.

Ben Wever’s focus on “Cathedral” as a crucible of how people learn is illuminating. This was my second reading of Carver’s famous short story, and I approached it in view of insights gleaned from our assigned article on “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts.” That is, I tried to take the time to read the story more deeply than I had initially done several years ago and to extract more meaningful connections.

The first time I read “Cathedral,” I absorbed the sheer immediacy of the narrative, immersing myself in the ambiance of marital tensions, an imagined blue collar cage of a home with alcohol, pot and a TV blaring, and the strange insertion of a blind man into a scene of commonplace domesticity. Racing through the story within my own limited frame of reference for its entertainment value, I suppose I was fishing in shallow waters, as the article describes.

This time I asked myself, “How would I try to teach ‘Cathedral’ to a class?” How did Carver achieve his vision? As a teacher, certainly I would need to fish in deeper waters myself in order to encourage others to embrace the challenge. This time as I read and reread segments of the story, I better appreciated how the rough, casual first-person narration was deceptively simple and subtly revealing. The narrator skims over his wife’s history, including her suicide attempt. His easy flow of words betrays the confines of their lives and as Ben Wever notes, the narrator’s own underlying insecurities. I would challenge a class to highlight some of the lines that they found most revealing. What does the dialogue tell us? I found the blind man’s repeated use of the word “bub” to be brilliant. I heard and saw him as a fellow in his own right. How else did the author make the characters come alive?

We know the blind man Robert from his gestures of fierce self-reliance, such as his operation of a ham radio that puts him in touch with the world, an incongruous preference for the color TV in his home, his ravenous eating, drinking and smoking, and his zest for a strawberry pie that he identifies by taste at dinner. The details are polished gems. Robert knows exactly how to break through the narrator’s defenses and to enlist his friendship; a connection is created. The wife who brings the two disparate men together becomes almost irrelevant, as she passes out between them on the sofa in her pink slippers and pink robe, which parts at the fold. The story is uncannily provocative.

It would be exciting to steer a class toward examining the elements of style, language and timeless thematic and psychological meaning that Carver achieves with such engaging simplicity. Reading closely and analytically is indeed an essential skill to derive meaning from serious texts. It is so worthwhile to try to exercise this broadly applicable skill and open the path for others to practice it, in my opinion.

I’ve been guilty of taking for granted “How Experts Differ from Novices,” but many of these intuitive claims got me to thinking how this knowledge can be applied.  If, as they say, “Experts have acquired extensive knowledge that affects what they notices and how they organize, represent, and interpret information in their environment.  This, in turn, affects their ability to remember, reason, and solve problems.”  Then, we can surmise this information and ability operates on a spectrum, constantly shifting according to attention afforded to the matter, and the fluctuations of knowledge and ability over time.   It seems quite obvious that meaningful patterns are more apparent to those with more experience.

DeGroot (1965) noted that for those who are ‘green’ ideas, “had to be abstracted” – which admittedly at first, I did not understand.  Used as a verb, I think deGroot means to say that the individual has to think of a quality or concept generally and without reference to any specific example (i.e. theoretically) whereas the expert has specific experiential instances to draw upon and make mental comparisons which inevitably lead to more well-formed conclusions.  The more one learns the less they learn in the ‘abstract’ sense.  I can’t help but be encouraged by the fact that from abstraction grows a tangible sense of the world over time.

Each person’s “conceptual structures” or cognitive schemas for organizing knowledge, theories, and assertions undoubtedly differ.   Is it enough to simply be aware that they exist and as authors of our own mental processes we can designates what’s appropriate and determine when our own knowledge is insufficient?   Such a level of meta-cognition is surely unavailable to students until their education and experienced reaches a certain level of maturity.  Personally, it has taken me a long time.  Depending on my mood, environment, or the context, I may be more of less will to admit what I don’t know regardless of whether or not I desire the problem-solving ability.   In this sense, it is the “Big ideas” that will lead to conceptual understand, as the article notes, and we can guide our students toward their own meta-cognition by admitting what we don’t know, the big ideas we do not for comparison, and then bridging the gap between the two.   Certainly, we can find some comfort in being on such a journey together while giving ourselves credit for that which we do know in advance.  This is an appropriate time to tie in the chapter’s next point about how knowledge is “conditionalized” – or pertaining to a specific rhetorical situation.  If the ownus largely falls on the student to identify and generate the “condition-action pairs” then how might we, as teachers, encourage the act of “fluent retrieval”?  Contextualize everything we teach or pair memorization with contextualization?  Shall we encourage original application of concepts through writing in order to re-map conceptual and cognitive schemas in student’s minds and tattoo them on long-term neural pathways?   One can’t help but continually envision DNA tracks like rollercoasters running through our minds, quickly and chaotically driving about without a specific destination in mind.

While I do not yet teach literature or teaching, I train and teach throughout my work-day in a corporate environment.  I struggle to teach foreign concepts to my team by first relating them to known concepts and usually this works.  However, it is largely reliant on their level of understanding of the former.  In this sense I am learning forward to enriching my own pedagogical content of my knowledge area so that I can better foster learning and development with my colleagues.

Having read this story previously, it was interesting to look at it through the lens of learning. I had never considered it from that angle before, but there is a lot going on in terms of different ways people learn, as well as the obstacles to learning that people encounter.

The narrator  has a number of difficulties in dealing with the presence of “This blind man, an old friend of [his] wife’s” in his home. One of his largest difficulties is his prior knowledge of Robert’s relationship with his wife, and his lack of knowledge relating to blind people.

His “idea of blindness came from the movies”, and not from any real-lifer experience. He believes that this gives him the information he needs to know what to expect of Robert, and “A blind man in my house was not something [he] was looked forward to.” When Robert arrives, his preconceptions are all rendered invalid, and he is forced to reconsider what being blind actually means

Another aspect of prior knowledge that interferes with the narrator’s ability to confront his wife’s blind friend is the prior knowledge of their relationship. In short, he is jealous. His knowledge of the intimate emotional nature of his wife’s friendship with Robert leads him to see the blind man as a threat to his own relationship with his wife. When she offered to play one of the tapes Robert sent, and they are interrupted before he can hear Robert’s opinion of him, he concludes that “Maybe it was just as well. I’d heard all I wanted to ..” He makes a false assumption that this intimate friend of his wife’s automatically dislikes or disapproves of him. The fact that his wife was previously married may also be playing into his insecurities here, but there seems to be a deeper issue of his own sense of self-worth at play.

He is reticent to confront these difficulties throughout the story, struggling to maintain even the aura of hospitality. It is only after he asks Robert a direct question that the narrator begins to consider things from Robert’s point of view. He realizes that Robert has no conception of what a cathedral is, and in struggling to explain it to him, is forced to confront his own limited abilities of describing such a building without using visual language.

When Robert directs him to draw a cathedral while he follows along, the narrator makes a connection, both physically and emotionally with the blind man. His preconceived notions of the blind as helpless and slightly pathetic are shattered, and he sees Robert instead as a fellow human being. His faulty prior knowledge proves to be the greatest obstacle to his ability to learn. It is Robert’s ability to think and learn in a way outside the narrator’s experience that allows the narrator to finally be able to learn as well. In closing his eyes at the end of the story, he attempts to experience, if ever so briefly, what being blind is like. In doing so, he accepts that there are things to be learned from Robert, this blind man who he at first wanted nothing to do with.

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.

I found the readings for today pleasantly practical for the classroom.   Throughout reading the first chapter of Textual Interventions I was highlighting ways to use the different exercises.  The idea of looking at things from an alternate perspective and creating something new from the perspective, then comparing the new with the old would create powerful, and interesting, learning.  It’s only been recently that I’ve realized how fluid texts are—this was not something taught to me in my high school or undergraduate education–and I wasn’t bringing this idea to my students.  The “Preludes” chapter offered some practical ways that this would now be possible for me.  I particularly liked the “I think, therefore I am” activity because one of my favorite writing activities for my freshmen was to work with NPR’s “This I Believe” essays and have each of them create a short essay with their life philosophy.  Playing with a statement like “I think, therefore I am,” and the implications of that would be a fascinating way to have students begin to think about their guiding principles.

Although I really enjoyed the “Preludes” chapter, the chapter “Introducing Difficulty” from The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty was even more engaging.  It expresses concisely and clearly the struggle I’ve had with students who believe the difficulty has no place in the classroom.  As the chapter quoted from the OED and J. South “They mistake difficulties for impossiblilities” (2).   Countless students have told me “This is hard,” implying they should not have to complete the task.  They do not consider that perhaps I have intended for the exercise to be hard, have assigned it because it is hard, and want them to wrestle with that difficulty.  I love the idea of doing a “Difficulty Paper,” because it includes students in a discussion who often feel on the fringes of an English class (those who know they have difficulties with understanding a reading) and forces other students to admit that they may have to struggle with certain aspects of a text.

I found chapter eight, “Helping Students Read Difficult Texts” from Engaging Ideas to be the least helpful in what I could do differently in my classroom.  I think the ideas presented are true—students do not know how to read for different purposes and often do not read as effectively or efficiently as they could or should.  But the ideas presented in the end were overwhelming, partly because I have tried using many of them.  They are valuable, and I have found that using them selectively for specific students with difficulties works quite well.  But when I tried to introduce them to all students as helpful measures they reported greater frustration with the reading that they lost any rhythm of the text and any sense of the pleasure of reading disappeared. While I acknowledge that it was my fault because of how I made students use those methods, the long list of them at the chapter’s end was quite reminiscent of a teaching style from which I have moved away.

Beginning with “How People Learn…”, I found myself in large agreement with, what I believe, to be their overarching point:  “Experts’ thinking seems to be organized around big ideas in physics, such as Newton’s second law and how it would apply, while novices tend to perceive problem solving in physics as memorizing, recalling, and manipulating equations to get answers” (38).  Echoed again, this time perhaps a step closer to our humanities home, “Experts in other social sciences also organize their problem solving around big ideas (42). With only one semester under my belt, I must admit, I’m relieved to know that I’m on the right track.

Let me backtrack; I’ve structured my class in such a way where students pick a current issue of national importance to research the entire semester, thereby steering away from the “mile wide and an inch deep” approach (42).  Then, they are assigned four different genre papers (definition, narrative, persuasive, and expository) guiding their deeper critical learning and kaleidoscopic view, as I call it.  With each unit, I extract one major step in the writing process and flush it out: research, voice, revision, and context.  But perhaps, the biggest parallel to “How People Learn…” is in one particular concept: revision.  I assign students, hefty but manageable, Nancy Sommers piece: “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Writers.”  The general idea being the same as the first excerpt mentioned; experienced, or expert, writers see revision as molding, reworking, and creation on a grander idea level; beginning writers see revision as how we would see editing that is changing out words, punctuation, and other basic in-line corrections.  To get them to see and approach writing creatively, they have to be aware of the metaphorical misshapen chunk of marble first–then comes David.  Just being aware there is a difference, between revision and editing, sparks a light bulb.  And in my little, but trying, experience, they ‘get it.’  Then again, they also get the revision process takes time and effort—much more than they’re willing to offer.  That’s where I loose them…

Shifting to “Engaging Ideas…”, as I vaguely mentioned in unit four, I cover context and encourage students to disagree with what their reading and add their own comments, ideas, etc. The thought there is a conversation going on with, in their minds is, an intimate object let alone “what conversation the text belongs too” boggles and opens their young, budding minds (135).  I love it!  Again, such a basic idea of thinking for one self and not agreeing with everything one read’s is huge for community college students!  For a whole unit, I stand in front of class acting like a cheerleader, “Your ideas matter! You just studied one thing for 16 weeks, surely you have some insight to offer!”  Truth be told, that’s the hardest part—unveiling confidence.  But I digress.

(As a general ‘hat tip’ moment, I’m plan on utilizing the marginal note approach and writing translations—both I think will come in handy for my now ESL majority group.)