After this week’s readings I can see why a well-thought out lesson is not always a success.  Frequent questions and frustrated quips stop the lesson such as “I don’t understand,” and “How am I supposed to ask you a question about something that’s too hard to know what to ask?” As in Salvatori and Donahue’s The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, it is obvious that one of the difficulties I have is gauging my audience.  Prior to engaging students in learning, the challenge appears to be preparing them for the opportunity that they may not understand the material, and letting them know that we have a plan for that circumstance. 

 During a lecture to a multi-education [level] public high school class, I present material by going for the “Big Picture” first, as an objective.  After accessing prior knowledge to foreground the material and exploring who might have a particular claim on the information, I tell my students that at any point in the class they can come up and write a question or observation concerning what I am saying on the board.  Then, using an outline, illustration, or graphic, I delineate the facts I’m offering in the lesson.  My plan is to conclude with the classes’ questions, based on what is not understood, interspersed with observations of what does not make sense, and (hopefully) form a common consensus of the material.  Co-operation works both ways. 

 It is obvious to teachers and parents that even the most motivated students can become complacent at times.  My favorite: while in a room with an 18” diameter clock:  “What time is it?” 

 You cannot observe the internal process of understanding or questioning.   In Difficulty, the authors point out that the student should realize that textbooks and literature are the results of a vast body of well thought-out work (6).  This appropriately implies that an equally vast effort might be required to understand the text.  Students rarely seem to have time to do the work required to unpack this suitcase of knowledge, because they are off to the next lesson: Math after English, PE after Physics.  This disruptive pattern of exposure to themes, coupled with a three-month gap in the re-enforcement and progression of information and ideas, stresses retention ability and the development of learning.

 Drawing attention to the importance of how the material is framed in “How People Learn:  Brain Mind, Experience, and School” is the graph of a chess board memory test.  Players of high, intermediate, and limited experience with the game are show the board for several seconds and asked to recreate (23).  Eventually, they all did quite well.  The difference in how long it took the subjects to accomplish the task with accuracy lies in the chapter title, “How Experts Differ from Novices”; experts notice patterns and can organize and interpret the information using their ability to remember, reason, and solve problems; novices look for one particular fact or formula they can grasp and apply.  This results in a lower quality of choices on the novices’ part (19).

 In addition to the effect prior knowledge has on learning and interpreting material, is the frame in which the material is placed.  In the chess example above, the experts did not always do well in remembering the game board.  This occurred when the pieces were placed with no recognizable pattern.  We can apply this in a multitude of both common and demanding circumstances such as peer patterns, cultural norms, language barriers, and learning differences.   With this is mind, reading strategies such as foregrounding the material and analyzing what makes it difficult for you to come to an understanding of it, demonstrates where my future focus should lie.