Is our job to make students a bit uncomfortable or to avoid challenges?

More "For the Love of Sentences" samples this week, with the first two referring to the recent coronation of Charles III. Americans are fascinated by British royalty and all the pomp and circumstance, even as we proudly proclaim our dislike of a very few people becoming rich and famous through an accident of birth.

Rachel Tashjian in The Washington Post weighed in on the ostentation of Charles’s coronation: “The red velvet robes trimmed in ermine, the five-pound crown, the gold robes on top of gold robes dragging over gold carpets — the regalia often made it feel like a Versace fashion show staged in an assisted-living facility.”

So many of these highlighted sentences depend a lot on the author assuming advanced vocabulary skills plus a wide-ranging grasp of popular culture, politics, and current events. There is a tendency to "dumb down" our examples and writing for media classes (maybe for most high school classes), but there are some solid arguments that take another tack.

We don't "dumb down" Shakespeare as a matter of course, preferring to guide students along the journey of learning new diction and syntax, not to mention the intricacies of iambic pentameter. Some might argue that students can't be expected to expand their working vocabulary if we don't push them a bit. 

"Ermine" and "regalia" may not be in many students' working vocabulary, but they could be. And they might not recognize "Versace" immediately, but adding that high fashion reference helps them see a wider world.

In The New Yorker, J.R. Moehringer, the ghostwriter of Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” reflected on the impossibility of walking entirely in this particular man’s shoes: “I’d worked hard to understand the ordeals of Harry Windsor, and now I saw that I understood nothing. Empathy is thin gruel compared with the marrow of experience.” 

Here the use of "gruel" is almost Dickensian, particularly when discussing the British royalty. Students may need to have the characteristics of "thin gruel" vs. "marrow" -- presumably connoting something richer. 

Also in The New York Times, Robert Draper profiled William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director: “His ascent is an unlikely turn for a tall, discreet figure with wary eyes, ashen hair and a trim mustache, a sort you could easily imagine in a John le Carré novel whispering into a dignitary’s ear at an embassy party that the city is falling to the rebels and a boat will be waiting in the harbor at midnight.”

Few students will be avid readers of John le Carré spy novels, but he is so famous that we owe them at least a way to translate such references when they appear. 

And Michael Levenson reported in the Times on the odd dumping of hundreds of pounds of pasta alongside a creek in Old Bridge, N.J. “When photos of the discarded pasta were shared on a Reddit discussion about all things New Jersey, it became fertile ground for puns and dad jokes,” he wrote. “Someone commented: ‘We should send the perpetrators to the state penne tentiary.’” Town workers cleaned up and disposed of the pasta in under an hour. “It was not clear if a large fork had been used.”

This reporting combines a mystery with allusions to food. Will students immediately smile reading "penne" as connected to "penitentiary"? Who knows? But this example illustrates using a pun and simply stretching what is expected from language.