Deciding that things are too hard

Michael Gorra, a recently retired Smith English professor. From The Chronicle of Higher Education :

I was teaching a Victorian novel class when “The End of the English Major,” that infamous article Nathan Heller wrote for The New Yorker, came out a few years ago. And I put the question to my students, “Is it too much to ask you to read Middlemarch ? Is it too hard?” I was really encouraged by their response, because they said, Yes, it’s hard, but we’re proud to be able to do it. They had a real sense of achievement, of having done something they hadn’t been certain they could do before they got to college.

Reading is like exercise. You have to go a little bit beyond what you’re comfortable with, a little bit more than you can really do, in order to get the benefit and to be able to do it easily later. You do get better, and it does get easier, but you have to set yourself an ambitious task. Deciding that things are too hard for students, I think, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I once told students that when a job interviewer asked about a challenge they took on in college, they could say, “I once had this professor, and he assigned this huge novel, and it was over a thousand pages,” &c.

See also Natalie Wexler: “Lower Academic Standards Can Perpetuate Unfairness,” especially the section “Fish Can’t Climb Trees.”

Two related posts
On “meeting them where they are” : Parts and wholes (On reading entire books) : Teaching Bleak House

[The thousand-plus novel would have been Infinite Jest. It took a long time.]