Frustrating and Life Enhancing

I was really intrigued by the quote from Gee (2003) in Miller, "Learning should be both frustrating and life enhancing."  I entirely agree with this.  I have retained the most knowledge, and the most useful knowledge, from classes that were both challenging and interesting.  I have attended many classes whose subject fascinated me, but the work was easy so I did not have to really injest the material.  But in classes that I had to really study and dissect the material in order to grasp the concepts, I learned an incredible amount; not only about the subject or the content, but about my abilities to learn in general. Reading Shakespeare is an excellent example. I remember almost everything from a Shakespeare play that I have studied because I have to really pay attention and examine every line in order to understand the vast amount of meaning that Shakespeare works into his lines.  But I can fly through a young adult novel, understand every word, but only retain the fine details for a short amount of time. 

I think that attaining this type of indepth learning is where multimodality or using technology in the classroom really comes into play.  Instead of just reading a book or a text, using technology or some other form of mental engagement would provide the interaction and context the students need to feel like they have really dissected the different levels provided by the assigned reading.  Having the students cross-referencing similar texts and writing down the similarities and differences or making flow charts of the characters and their roles in the text would provide a source outside the text that would contain information they have pulled out of the story themselves. And to me, knowing that I found the information and I figured out what a book is trying to tell me is much more of an accomplishment than simply memorizing what a teacher has said about a book and then applying it on test or in a paper.