After reading and marking up The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty and repeating the process with the selection relating the studies done on experts and novices, I noticed an overlap.  Often while reading Difficulty I wrote in the margins “But how do you teach students when to apply this?”

As the selection about novices and experts shows repeatedly, an expert recognizes patterns and is able to begin solving the problem—in fact, to know that a problem exists at all—because of their expert knowledge.  While Difficulty provides a method for students to attack difficulties, how will a novice student know when they should be struggling?

Reflecting on the difficulty papers provided by student novices within the book and thinking of my own experiences with students, I realized that some difficulties will be easy for students to spot.  A cultural element that isn’t familiar or a difficult word are easily identified stumbling blocks.  I can see the difficulty paper being a productive strategy for helping students navigate these types of difficulties.

On the other hand, other types of difficulties frequently go unrecognized by students.  Difficulty addressed a large section to reading Shakespeare, which led me to reflect on my own experiences as a reader and teacher of Shakespeare’s work.  There are many words in early modern English that have altered in meaning over time and these are often stumbling blocks for students.  For example, the expression “passing fair” is often taken by students to mean that the woman in question is “just barely attractive” because of how the word “passing” is understood by the student—or so they think.  It is only with an expert’s help that a student realizes that the word “passing” didn’t mean what they thought it meant.

I don’t bring this topic to light in order to attack of dismiss the idea of the difficulty paper, but it does give me questions about how to teach students the difficulty paper.  I can certainly model how to spot difficulties for my students—but is that enough?  Is there something more I can do as the most expert person in the room to help my students identify difficulties?

Though I have questions remaining about the strategies presented in Difficulty, I did appreciate that the strategies given emphasize showing students how much they know rather than how much they have left to learn.  I have watched many students become disheartened by their own confusion and so I know how important a student’s confidence is to following through on a difficult text.  Reading this text has definitely inspired me to make a more conscious effort to demonstrate to students how their struggles with literature are an indication of their successes and not their failures.