As I addressed in class, the first three pages posed to be the biggest "difficulty" I was forced to battle through in the text. I quickly began to question my ability to get through the entire book. In having to re-read sentences, paragraphs and entire pages over and over again, I found myself wondering how children would deal with this challenge. What I do know is how I would have dealt with it as a child and that would have been closing the book and putting it on the shelf. After Molly addressed the fact that a book's challenging of the reader can related to an individual difficulty, I was able to start confronting my dilemma head on. While I initially thought it was the vocabulary that made the first three pages so difficult for me, dwelling on the topic after class and while preparing for this blog I have come to think of various other possibilities of why I found those pages so difficult. Regardless of whether it is difficult vocabulary, sentence structure, punctuation, word choice and placement, or tone pace, an exact pin-pointing of what is so difficult can only be uncovered through more confrontations with texts that challenge me.
I am glad that I had the opportunity to read a story I had never read, much less heard of and that it resulted in such a positive reading experience for me. The ability to recognize a text as challenging and facing the difficulties it presents directly has not only made me a more careful reader but a more knowledgeable individual as a whole.
I like how you said this text made you a more careful reader because of the difficulty. Often when I read I do it just for pleasure, but even fun reading requires you to follow a plot. Sometimes, if we aren't careful and don't take time to slow down and really grasp what is going on, we can miss out on important things. I never thought of being a "careful" or "careless" reader until now, so thanks for pointing that out!
ReplyDeleteI think it's interesting that you point out that you wouldn't expect for a children's novel to be challenging to a college student, but this book is. As we have been reading throughout the semester, there were several times that I thought, "This is a children's novel?" When I was in elementary and junior high school, we never looked at text the way we do in class and I wish we would have. I think that students can really benefit from reading difficult texts at all ages.
ReplyDeleteI found your post both comforting and true. I had great difficulty getting started in the novel as well. It reminded me of Wizard of Earthsea and the difficulty that I faced when we first started this class. I went into the class with the mindset that everything was going to be easy to read and interpret and I have found that this class and these books is far more challenging than some of the college level literature that I am undertaking in my classes.
ReplyDeletegreat post! I agree; I had a hard time reading this book. I wouldn't have put it in the category of a children's novel, but I learned things from the novel that are important for young readers to learn as well.
ReplyDeleteI thought I wasn't going to make it through the book as well. I found it weird that I had to reread paragraphs that were in a children's book. I'm glad some other people in the class dealt with the same issue. I think if children read books similar to M.C. then they will become better readers. They will be better readers than me, a senior who had a hard time reading a children's book.
ReplyDeleteI also found this book hard to read. I think that if I were a kid and not assigned to read it, I would have given up at page 3. I agree that if children read books like this it would make them better readers and help their vocabulary. I even stuggled with some of it. I could easily see how this book could also be very frustrating to children and make them not like to read. I know that if i were a kid and HAD to read this book, I definately would not have been pleased, and probally would not look forward to seeing whatelse the teacher had in store.
ReplyDeleteI too found it hard to get invested in the story - I cam only imagine how it would be for an actual child. But I think it is important to challenge kids and make the pay off all the more worthwhile. I think intertwining both types of difficulty can make for a stronger and more well-rounded reader
ReplyDeleteThis is great self-reflection, and I think it will help you when you are trying to tell other people about the book or help them read through it. I agree that this was a more difficult reading, and it was different than what I was used to. I have to admit that it made me curious because I did not immediately understand and ended up being a book I could not put down. I also liked Molly's presentation. It solidified the ways in which different readers engage with difficult texts.
ReplyDeleteI found it interesting when the class discussion went to the part about how so many found this text difficult to get through, especially in the first few pages. I think perhaps it has mostly to do with the fact that this story has many elements of my own culture. Where I live there is a family that no one goes near because they are believed to be practitioners of "witchcraft". Needless to say my neighbors are a superstitious lot...Anyway, I found it interesting since I did not have that much difficulty with M.C. Higgins, but rather I found Dicey's Song harder. I believe it is all a matter of perspecive and background.
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