I think of two types of struggle when considering the student experience in my class. One type of struggle I would consider unproductive and constraining, while the other I would say is an almost necessary condition for any deep, lasting learning. Shaughnessy’s line about “written anguish” as an alternative “English” felt like an apt characterization of the first type of struggle. Her subsequent of convoluted language mirrored some of the sentences that I’ve encountered in my students’ writing. It feels like they had some content conglomerate, with rigid skeletal pieces, doughy fluids, and viscous organs, that they then then shoved through a crack in a doorway, stomping it with their foot until it emerged, a goofy shape, resembling some combination of the original body of thoughts and the negative space of the door.

Struggle that resembles anguish, or torture, or a brain squeezing against the too tight hair net wrapped around it, seems to originate from the fact that the student is “already conditioned to the belief that there is something wrong with his English”. This isn’t true with all of my students, and I think I might be romanticizing the impact of our curriculum to a degree here, in that it’s meant to lift the burden of prescribed language, and the preconditions to success that students encounter in universities, and that I am seeing the under the bed monster where it doesn’t exist. But sometimes they string together long words and complicated sentence structures in the wackiest way. I have to assume it is a reaction to some imagined (but also real) parameters.

The second classification of struggle, I would say is more in line with the muscular/athletic metaphors that are always found in exhortations for hard work, and sayings on how nothing good comes easily or whatever. However, I would like to be a little more specific, and would say that no moment of lasting learning comes without a confounding issue, or a problem the student must solve. Struggle as an instance of internal flexing, or of handling and turning and wringing around a topic/question feels like a sort of pedagogical home run.

I think the second form of struggle requires a tricky balance of several factors. Probably primarily it originates with attentive and careful lesson planning. I think it needs a generous time allotment, a clever progression or intentional layering. A lesson that prompts this type of struggle needs a script, but also needs a hefty allotment of flexibility from an instructor. It also requires buy in from students, which can be undermined by poor sleep, social insecurity (or overconfidence), general unrest, and low blood sugar.

It’s hard to evaluate how often my students experience this elusive type of struggle as a lot of the work they’re doing is outside of class. I hope it’s a lot. But I have a feeling that in addition to the wonky conditioning/constraining they’ve experienced for how to communicate, they’ve also been conditioned to cleverly work less. They are experts at studying an instructor’s habits and expectations, to find the path of least resistance, the road of little struggle. I just wish I could show them that to walk on this road they have to shoot themselves in the feet.