Tutoring yesterday. One of the students taking the class I SHOULD be teaching next year comes in, completely overwhelmed, eyes blood shot, just worn down. He is making himself crazy trying to make sense of an essay about the discourse of gene action and trying to figure out how it relates to this other difficult essay about scientific discovery. He at first resists using the dictionary but by the end of the session he grabs for it. I help him make sense of the text, a little, show him how to break down a difficult passage (well, they all are). But mostly I advise him to stop being so hard on himself, to give himself a break--take the night off from this essay--and to just work with the few passages he can actually understand. I can relate to feeling so frustrated, on a student level, but on a teacher level I start to get mad. I understand the purpose of assigning difficult, theoretical readings to students right off the bat; they need to be challenged, especially at my school, which does call for academic rigor. Their readings aren’t going to get much easier as they move on, so they should learn how to work with difficult texts and how to make connections between seemingly disparate topics. But when choosing such difficult texts, it would seem to make sense to concentrate on subject matter that is more general. In the lower level classes, their readings are about affirmative action and teaching middle class values. The readings are lengthy and complex, but they’re about stuff students have heard about to some degree (and I guess some of those essays don’t need to be SO complex; they are graduate level readings). Gene action, however, is not something people outside of the sciences have general knowledge about. Seeing this student and others so frustrated is not easy. I know I am going to get mad next year WHEN I teach, even though I understand the departmental rationale.