I am interested by Lee Shulman’s treatment and respect for “the learning that’s already inside the learner” (11), and am happy to further explore Shulaman’s “dual process” learning with Salvatori and Donahue’s concept of repertoire. I like the immediate exposure of potential harm caused by a repertoire of negative assumptions: “If you believe you dislike poetry, for example, you may be unwilling to engage in the process of careful, attentive, and slow reading,” (18). Would high school students buy and try that their success as learners is helped or hurt by their own thoughts on learning? I was a terrible student in high school and would now blush at my fifteen-year-old response to a geometry teacher who tried to explain my learning difficulties were partially the result of a destructive self-repertoire. However, undergraduates seem more likely to work with a concept like repertoire and appreciate, or at least experiment with, their understanding of themselves as affecting their work with or understanding of difficult materials.

Although I did not have the awesome vocabulary of difficulty to guide me, chapter 7 and the difficulty of Shakespeare could have been written about my undergraduate education. Sophomore year of high school I didn’t even try to read Julius Caesar and dismissed Shakespeare as impossible for me to understand. Then I made the mistake of pursuing a degree in English and one in theatre. To anyone involved in a college theatre department Shakespeare is not just a great author, but actually a great religion: deity and holy book to guide one’s life. For a year and a half year I side-stepped every course description mentioning the almighty convinced of my inability to understand. If the professor for my play analysis course hadn’t changed last minute I would have missed out on my favorite play, King Lear. My professor demystified Shakespeare, placed him within our reach and utilized every bit of our personal repertoires to have us relate to and make our own understandings of the family issues, betrayals, clothing motif, existential issues of humanity, and all the other beautiful difficulties most would place beyond the sphere of undergraduate attention. And we ate it up. My professor shared his own difficulties with the play and encouraged us never to be satisfied with any one answer. The process of discovery was different than presented in chapter 7, for example, we were encouraged to look up historical resources and critical responses, but it was the continual focus on the moments of confusion and difficulty that lead us to dig deeper and understand deeper. I’ll stop the nostalgia train, but that class really was as wonderfully cheesy as it sounds and the most important class on close reading and understanding that I experienced.

Therefore, I was a little bummed with Salvatori and Donahue’s initial confinement of repertoire. Their introduction to the concept in chapter two kicks off with “your poetic repertoire, your prior assumptions and experiences with poetry,” (17) and a list of probing questions confining the students repertoire to the students’ genre specific inside learning. I’m for a more out-of-the-box repertoire. When we discuss poetic language why not draw on the deep understanding of similes and metaphors provided by our students’ interaction with rap lyrics? The student writer Julian Betkowski utilized a David Bowie song to work with the difficulties of Krik? Krak! demonstrating the depth of her repertoire. We should be aware of the vastness of learning already within our students and connect our teaching to their repertoires on as many levels as possible. Of course we should focus on our discipline and foster the growth of genre-specific repertoires, but I want to be aware of every teaching resource available, whether provided from or for my students.