Building a Theory of Difficulty

Some thoughts on David Perkins' "Theory of Difficulty"
An important part of our planning as educators is to predict, hopefully based on experience, what will be hard about a given activity. And that doesn't mean, who will be hard. That is to say, we teachers cannot ever lay the blame on our challenging class or the fact that they did not learn a given skill in an earlier grade. "These kids just aren't getting it." No, thou shalt not blame the learner. 

Our job, instead, is to research the cause of the difficulty and let it inform our teaching. For example, the California missions present a very complex moral problem within a long-gone historical context. We risk thinking about it with only our contemporary lens and within our context, where of course they were immoral places that enslaved Native people. From the present perspective, they clearly never should have happened. 

The difficulty in really understanding the California missions – and the big moral question of how the heck one could in good conscience behave like the padres did, especially knowing that they thought they were doing something intrinsically and ultimately good–is that historical causation is so complex. It is abstract, dynamic, conditional, nonlinear; it is a real cluster of causes and conditions. 

What I think is truly difficult about gaining perspective and understanding this time period is that we simply cannot know what it was like to live in Spain in the 18th century and be a member of the Catholic church during the Inquisition. Simulations, field experiences, and thinking routines are such powerful tools for developing perspective, but we will ultimately fall short of ever really getting it. And the responsibility therefore lies in stating the problem to the students, publicizing the theory of difficulty, acknowledging that which we cannot know. 

And that won't stop us from writing a letter to the San Diego Padres to let them know that in this present context, a name like "Padres" really doesn't fly with us. 




Homework:

4th graders have the same homework as last night, if they did not finish;

5th graders are to fill in their portfolio self reflections by underlining pertinent statements about where they think their performance and understanding falls

20 minutes of language choice: Wordly Wise, fiction drafting, cursive, or typing

Read!

Fifth graders looked at symmetrical designs cut out of paper and imagined how one would fold and cut the paper to achieve the design. Imagine cutting paper snowflakes in reverse...hard!