After reading The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty I find that I have one major difficulty with the book.  I feel that with so much focus given to the difficulty paper throughout each chapter, it is only appropriate to write my blog as if it were a difficulty paper about this book.

For the entirety of the book, I was engaged and excited about the ideas the authors were presenting.  I had never before considered difficulty as a means of exploring and learning.  While reading the first chapter, I came to the realization that if a learner can learn to identify and work through their difficulties with a text, then the three pathologies (amnesia, fantasia, inertia) discussed in Lee Shulman’s article are more likely to be avoided.  If one can find the answers for oneself instead of being given them by a well-meaning teacher, then that person is much less likely to forget or distort what she learned and will  more likely be able to use that knowledge later because of the exercise of discovering the meaning for herself.

In chapter two, the authors explored the difficulties of poetry but insisted that learners already have a repertoire of knowledge that gives them the necessary tools to work through new and challenging poems.  In chapter four they return to this idea.  “What is important is that we become able to identify and use our pre-understandings as a scaffold to construct new understandings.” (62).  This idea of scaffolding and building upon what you know is not new.  I am very familiar with it from my days of being an elementary teacher.

The difficulty I have is a contradiction I found in the last chapter of the book.  In the section about reading a “great” author, Salvatori and Donahue seem to contradict what they had stated in the previous six chapters regarding pre-understandings.  They point out that sometimes our pre-understandings can be a difficulty in and of themselves especially when reading a well-known author whose reputation is greater than our own personal experience with his or her works.  So, in the first six chapters, the authors establish that one must use what they already know in order to make connections with new material and be able to learn.  I get that.  But, in the case of a well-known author, we should put aside pre-conceived ideas in order to adequately understand the text.  So, what we already know is not useful?  This seems like a contradiction, but I also understand the point they are trying to make.  Students should use their pre-understandings but only up to a certain point – the point where their prior knowledge may be the source of the difficulty.  This requires a novice learner to exhibit metacognition and be self-aware enough to monitor his or her own learning.  Or, it requires us teachers to be the monitor and know how to help the students identify when their deceptive pre-understandings are the cause of their difficulty.