I’m Still on Hiatus but…
I’m wondering if anyone wants to take a shot at drawing the lines between these three things:
Exhibit 1
Exhibit 2
Exhibit 3
“Let me try to explain how it feels to see again and again material you should once have learned but didn’t.
You are given a problem. It requires you to simplify algebraic fractions or to multiply expressions containing square roots. You know this is pretty basic material because you’ve seen it for years. Once a teacher took some time with you, and you learned how to carry out these operations. Simple versions, anyway. But that was a year or two or more in the past, and these are more complex versions, and now you’re not sure. And this, you keep telling yourself, is ninth- or even eighth-grade stuff.
Next it’s a word problem. This is also old hat. The basic elements are as familiar as story characters: trains speeding so many miles per hour or shadows of buildings angling so many degrees. Maybe you know enough, have sat through enough explanations, to be able to begin setting up the problem: “If one train is going this fast . . .” or “This shadow is really one line of a triangle . . . .” Then: “Let’s see . . .” “How did the Jones do this?” “Hmmmm.” “No.” “No, that won’t work.” Your attention wavers. You wonder about other things: a football game, a dance, that cute new checker at the market. You try to focus on the problem again. You scribble on paper for a while, but th tensions wins out and your attention flits elsewhere. You crumple the paper and begin daydreaming to ease the frustration.
The particulars will vary, but in essence this is what a number of students go through, especially those in so-called remedial classes. They open their textbooks and see once again the familiar and impenetrable formulas and diagrams and terms that have stumped them for years. There is no excitement here. No excitement. Regardless of what the teacher says, this is not a new challenge. There is, rather, embarrassment and frustration and, not surprisingly, some anger in being reminded once again of longstanding inadequacies. No wonder so many students finally attribute their difficulties to something inborn, organic: “That part of my brain just doesn’t work.” Given the troubling histories many of these students have, it’s miraculous that any of them can lift the shroud of hopelessness sufficiently to make deliverance from these classes possible. ”
-Mike Rose in Lives on the Boundary