From the Editor

Recently, while doing some work in connection with James Joyce's Ulysses, I read an article by a prominent Joyce scholar, Vicki Mahaffey, entitled "Love, Race, and Exiles: The Bleak Side of Ulysses."  Near the end of that essay, Mahaffey discusses the value of reading difficult texts, like Ulysses. I was struck by her comments, and I think that her insights about reading apply to teachers and the choices they make when selecting reading material for their students. 

Mahaffey believes that love and reading are "intimately connected in the world of Ulysses.  Reading a text with mastery and ease . . . may be reassuring, but it is hardly enriching and seldom inspiring.  Frustration with reading that resists easy appropriation is a sign of the expectation that most things are easy to penetrate, to assimilate, to conquer."  Mahaffey goes on to say that, "This is what most readers think they want – to possess knowledge . . . but, paradoxically, when a text . . . is less accessible it kindles the reader's sense of wonder."  Many of our students, too, want and expect complete mastery over all we set before them.  Some – frequently our best students – think that schoolwork, and reading in particular, should be relatively undemanding and painless.  These students are frustrated by frustration; they want a clear, uncluttered path to complete comprehension. But the most important stuff to learn does require struggle and may not always lead to perfect understanding and it is our job to help our students see this.

In Joyce's play Exiles, Mahaffey goes on to say, a character named Richard "holds that to care for the future is to destroy all curiosity and wonder in the world.  We [Mahaffey says] could paraphrase and extend Richard's comment by saying that to understand a book on a first reading is to destroy all curiosity and wonder in the world. To make understanding difficult but not impossible is a gift, but it is hardly philanthropy.  It is a gift of labor that allows the reader the ability to “free herself from self-limiting assumptions."  Assigning challenging reading – whether it’s William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, or complicated sections in math or science texts – too often sets off cries of "This is too hard," "This isn't fair," "I don't get it." As educators, we can't give in to the demand for uncomplicated material; if we do, we do a disservice to our students.   I am sure that many of us have enjoyed the "reader's sense of wonder" that Mahaffey referred to; I know I have.  Mahaffey's words are more encouragement, if any is needed, to constantly push our students, to expose them to difficult but accessible material.

". . . to free herself from self-limiting assumptions" seems to me to be the highest goal a teacher should strive for in educating her students.  More important than analyzing famous battles, scoring big on the SAT, using the Quadratic Formula, or learning the definition of iambic pentameter, is the freeing of a young mind from the hesitation and lack of confidence that hold one back from full engagement with learning.  Every student must be appropriately challenged, not just so they realize their potential, but also so that, as Mahaffey asserts, the door is opened onto "curiosity and wonder in the world."

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