As many of you have discussed already, the idea of challenging our students and effectively teaching poses a complex dilemma for teachers.  When I read The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, I found myself constantly recalling teaching snafus, moments in which I just hadn’t realized how difficult works had been for my students.  One of my tweets this week mentions that Othello may be a more accessible text than Hamlet for high school students.  Then, coincidentally, in the chapter we read from How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, the writers included a way to get at Hamlet from a more relevant place for high school students.  On page 34, the book assesses how two new teachers tackled Hamlet differently; though they are both experts, one teacher drew too much on his college experience to teach less-prepared students about the “notions of ‘linguistic reflexivity’ and issues of modernism,” while the other started out with a scenario to which the students could relate.  Only once the students could relate to Hamlet’s frustration at his uncle’s usurpation of power did the teacher introduce the play.

This reminds me of a moment last November when I observed another advanced class (an IB class rather than the AP class I teach) at another school.  In some kind of arbitrary moment of fortune, I happened to observe a class on Hamlet, just as I was beginning to teach the play myself.  The “virtuoso” teacher I observed had introduced the students to the play little by little, whereas for years I had been quizzing the students almost immediately to make sure they had both read and understood on their own.  I wanted to introduce them to the difficulty of college, but at the same time, for years I had been overwhelming them with material that was both challenging and at times, un-relatable.  This past few months, I have been working to more effectively introduce the stories  (and make them relevant to their lives) as well as address difficulties that I anticipate they may have ahead of time.  It has been rewarding for the students and for me to see how much better they understand with a little preliminary help from me. 

After reading The Elements, I’ve also considered how I handle the question of  reflecting on “difficulty.”  One of the things I have significantly neglected to do with my students is to ever have them reflect in writing about what exactly they find difficult.  We often discuss the challenges they face as they are reading and afterward, but I am entirely convinced that some reflective writing, specifically on what precisely turns them off about what we read and what overwhelms them, would really enhance my teaching.

I wanted to leave off with one of my favorite quotations from How People Learn:

Beliefs about what it means to be an expert can affect the degree to which people explicitly search for what they don’t know and take steps to improve the situation. In a study of researchers and veteran teachers, a common assumption was that “an expert is someone who knows all the answers.”  This assumption had been implicit rather than explicit and had never been questioned and discussed. But when the researchers and teachers discussed this concept, they discovered that it placed severe constraints on new learning because the tendency was to worry about looking competent rather than publicly acknowledging the need for help in certain areas.

When I first began teaching six years ago, I wanted to seem like an “expert.”  In recent years, I have come to terms with the boundless knowledge that goes into the various concepts inherent in teaching high school English.  If any of us knew everything there is to know about grammar, vocabulary, rhetoric, linguistics (and so much more), and if we had read all of the literature that exists, we would be superhuman.  Admitting our limits as humans, and therefore our limits as teachers, can be refreshing for both us and for the students.