I was really intrigued by all of the readings for this week’s class and found myself having lengthy “conversations” with each text…especially The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. I was initially turned-off but what I perceived as Salvatori and Donahue’s haughty tone. I feel that the tone of the book is that of someone who has achieved enlightenment as opposed to someone who has gained knowledge but recognizes that they, too, are still learning. I also found the work extremely repetitive, as others have noted on Twitter and in their posts.
Although I am highly critical of the book. I do feel that Salvatori and Donahue had some valid, important points, and there were some intriguing parts sprinkled throughout the work. Salvatori and Donahue focus on the fact that students tend “to ignore what [does] not make sense, focusing on what [is] clear and presenting their knowledge in the form of carefully crafted and supported arguments” (103). How true! Students are not excited about the idea of confronting the difficulties they experience with the text. Salvatori and Donahue’s whole argument rests on the idea that these moments of difficulty must be tackled because they lead to greater understanding. I agree. However, the authors suggest that they are giving various ways of approaching a text when, really, it’s all the same approach—identify moments of difficulty and work through them to reach greater understanding. I would like to think that most English teachers do this already and encourage this practice of their students, although they might not use the same jargon that Salvatori and Donahue do. We encourage students to confront difficulty when we have class discussions and ask what students have questions about, what they’ve noticed, etc. These are great springboards to class discussion about a text! We work through the questions and observations together and begin to work our way to a greater understanding of the work. I have my students do Reader’s Logs for various works. Students write about their questions and observations to an assigned reading and they must support these questions/observations, forcing them to think out the “difficulties” in writing and work towards a deeper understanding of the work. (My Reader’s Logs seem to be a less-abstract version of “The Difficulty Paper.”)
I agree that students need to be encouraged to tackle their difficulties. I also agree that students tend to be easily deceived by a “difficult” text disguised as an “easy” one and fall into what I call the “plot trap,” feeling as if, and deciding, that there’s nothing else to say. As teachers, we need to push students to ask questions and make observations, and then encourage them to run with those thoughts and questions a bit, exploring them and making connections. I think that, as teachers, we also need to be careful that we start with what our students observe and question rather than presenting our own thoughts and ideas. I really like what Salvatori and Donahue pointed out about “interpretive communities.” The authors point out that “communities of readers […] learn to read in similar ways, to value certain textual elements and to disregard others” (8). Our classrooms are interpretative communities. Teachers have certain preferred approaches and interests, things we gravitate to in a text and then point out and ask. Students pick up on these tendencies and we need to be really carefully! Two things I really “get into” are narrative structure and color symbolism. Before I knew it, without my really being aware that I was focusing on these two elements so heavily in “discussions,” I felt like this was all my students were talking about. At one point, a student submitted a thesis proposal and, in response to “why do you want to write about this topic?”(a question my students answer along with each thesis proposal), he very honestly stated he wanted to write about narrative structure because he knew I really like to analyze the structure of works and, therefore, he thought he would do well on the paper. Yikes! Now, I always start with student questions and observations—moments of “difficulty”—and we go from there. We need to check ourselves and make sure we’re mixing it up and letting students work through their process of reading and analysis, not ours.