After reading only a few chapters of The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, I realized I had become a bit cynical. Sure, I thought. The students described in this book are willing to do the difficult work required of careful reading. My students are not. As a rule I dislike cynicism (Sidenote: anyone catch Conan’s comments re: cynicism last night? So refreshing!), so I was disappointed to find myself already questioning the relevance of these concepts to my classroom. (I was also disconcerted by the repetitiveness of the writing—not to mention the incorporation of definitions such as simile and personification—and I must admit it took me a while to get past these venial flaws.) It seemed at first that the discussions and activities presented in the book would be well over the heads of my students; however, as I continued to read, a few ideas have jumped out at me. In fact, I just finished Chapter Five and now have a new appreciation of the concept of difficulty (and its relevance to my students). I actually had to force myself to put the book down and begin this blog while my thoughts are still fresh (albeit a bit scattered).
Although some of the book’s activities may be better suited to an undergrad class, there are certainly basic concepts that relate to high school students such as I teach (sophomore “honors” students who are generally less than prepared for the rigors of an honors curriculum). Recently I’ve been mulling over the dilemma that confronts me daily: my students are in an honors course, yet they lack the foundational skills necessary for reading carefully (if at all), making predictions, and drawing relevant inferences. In short, their reading comprehension skills are nonexistent (or atrophied from lack of exercise). The idea of engaging with a text is foreign to these kids. They expect to be able to do one quick reading (those who read the text at all—others opting for the quicker fix of consulting SparkNotes) and understand everything. Obviously they’re missing the point.
Issues of enrollment aside, I know I need to meet my students where they are and provide support to help them move forward as readers. The concept of embracing difficulty as “a rewarding path to knowledge” (back cover) may be a bit too much to ask, but I hope to be able to encourage the kids to view their difficulties as opportunities to enhance their understanding of a text, not as impermeable barriers to comprehension (a la Kim Woomer’s comments regarding “difficulties” and “obstacles” on page 2). I anticipate my attempts succeeding with the students who are actually interested in becoming better readers, and I suppose I’ll just have to tolerate the apathy of the others.
The section in Chapter Five about Krik? Krak! fascinated me. I haven’t read the entire book, but some of my undergrad classmates used it for lesson planning activities, so I was familiar with it. After reading the three difficulty papers presented about KK, I immediately flipped to Appendix D to read “Night Women” and “Between the Pool and the Gardenias.” I really enjoyed both stories and am already tossing around thoughts of how to incorporate excerpts from the book in my class. Due to a combination of factors (the recent earthquake in Haiti; the fact that my students are currently learning about the Haitian Revolution in the history half of my World Civ course; and the fortuitous coincidence that I have a few days to spare in my lesson plans), this would be the perfect time to study selections from KK. My ideas are all abstract at the moment, so I’d appreciate suggestions from others. I plan to pick up the book later today and (if possible) read it this weekend. I hope to find a story or two to use with my classes. I’m envisioning an annotation activity where the students color code their reading difficulties (i.e. red=unknown word, blue=I don’t know what this sentence means, green=what does this have to do with the story? and so on). My students generally do well with annotations, but I’m not sure how they’d handle monitoring their reading and stopping so often to make notations. In any event, I hope to sort out a plan in the next couple of days, as I’d like to do the lesson on Tuesday or Wednesday. And as I said, all input is welcome!
I appreciate your frustration with the repetition of The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, and I think some it might be due to the awkward way the book is addressing two different audiences (students and teachers).
I was struck by how you described your students as lacking “the foundational skills necessary for reading carefully (if at all), making predictions, and drawing relevant inferences. In short, their reading comprehension skills are nonexistent.” I want to push back against this idea and suggest that it’s not that their reading comprehension skills are nonexistent; rather, they are having difficulty transposing a likely rich literacy-based skill set from other domains of their life into the domain of literature. The same students who have difficulty drawing inferences from a poem or seeing patterns in a short story might be amazingly adept at the exact same kind of problem-solving in videogames or following the narrative of Lost.
We’ll be returning to this idea again and again throughout the semester. But for now I encourage you to give your students the benefit of the doubt, and trust that many of them have the right skills (of course, with some varying degree of competency), but that they are not finding ways to apply these skills to literature.