Thoughts after a recent day of teaching:
Today was a downward spiral. We’re working on the infamous five paragraph essay. The first hour class seemed to understand the concept of a thesis and then three main points to back that up. They started writing and had few issues. I thought maybe I’d explained it pretty well.
Second hour floundered a bit but got back on the horse and about 75% of students had a good thesis and main points by the end of the hour.
Third hour started with mischievous shenanigans between my classroom and Rachel’s. I found myself wishing corporal punishment was still an option. I cut down on the lecture and gave them more time to write and confer individually with me.
Fourth hour was a zoo. I gave up on lecturing and told them to just write their papers. As soon as I said it I realized how unfair it was. The students who were loud and disrespectful probably enjoyed the opportunity to goof off working with their neighbors and the students who had been listening were now confused about the work. I tried to circulate to everyone and found my spirits drooping with every student I saw.
After class I tried to pinpoint exactly what had gone wrong, so it would never happen again. I came up with a few possibilities.
Content. It is very difficult to explain a thesis and main points to a classroom of freshmen. This is something writers continue to struggle with through college and beyond.
Catering to all of their levels. What level should they really be at? When to push and when to encourage? What to push and what to encourage? And how to teach this skill all within an abstract essay, the format of which I simply put up with when I was their age?
Format. It’s criminal, what I’m doing to them. I’m subjecting them to the same essays I had to write when I was their age, even though there are better ways to teach the same concepts. I’m reading Katie Wood Ray, a professional writer for teachers who advocates inquiry and writing assignments in the same genres students might see outside of the classroom. And I’m doing everything she says not to. This five paragraph essay appears to the students to have nothing to do with their lives.
Writing is inherently ambiguous because it’s people’s thinking on paper. People’s thinking is intangible and ambiguous. Yet I have to translate the beautiful ambiguity into rigid formulas and lists for students to try to grasp. When really, they already think and write in multiple ways. They are making judgements and using their higher order thinking all the time.
Navigating the halls of this high school and the many arenas of their complex lives requires huge amounts of energy and ingenuity. They’re brilliant. And I’m dumbing them down into a linear outline about a book most of them are ready to throw in the trash after already three weeks of work on it.
Why can’t we do brochures or advertisements or any genre that they might actually use as writers someday? A genre they might buy into?
The answer: Because we have to teach them to write from their reading in a standard format that is easy to assess for understanding for standardized test purposes. The five paragraph essay fits these criteria.
The five paragraph essay also involves the basic elements of argument. Point, back it up, explain. Argument is used all the time in regular people’s writing and conversation, and thus it is an important skill to learn. But argument is usually used in practical genres for practical purposes.
Why aren’t we using those genres with our students, too? Writing up a police report to convict George? Writing up a diagnosis or care procedures sheet for Lennie in a mental institution? These would foster character analysis and argument skills just as well.
Is there room for both the formal academic genre and the progressive practical genre? Is there enough time for all this writing amidst all the other skills I have to teach? Perhaps I could fuse them into one writing project or give students the option to choose one. There are so many grand experiments to try in the classroom, but the high stakes, students’ learning and development, make me cautious.
If I decide to stick with the five paragraph essay because many of them need the structure in order to clearly express their ideas, can I really convince them that the five paragraph essay has something meaningful to offer them in their own lives?
Popularity: 1% [?]
Gwen:
I sympathize with you completely. I think that teaching students to write well is one of the most difficult things to do and feel privileged to have observed, as part of my research, some high school English teachers who have awed me with their skill. If you email me at rhkurtz@yahoo.com, I can try to put you in touch.
In terms of relevance–for your students who are collegebound–I think that essay writing is extremely important. Many of the college students I teach really struggle with the essay format. Their top challenges:
1. Writing an introduction rather than plunging straight ahead into their essays. Tying up their thoughts with a conclusion.
2. Creating a cohesive structure in which one paragraph transitions logically to the next.
3. Fully explaining their thoughts rather than assuming I will kind of read between the lines since I am familiar with the topic.
4. Meaningfully incorporating quotations from the text with analysis that does not simply repeat what the quotation stated. There’s also a lot of what I call “quote seeding”–scattering quotes throughout the essay without any sort of explanation about why they’re there.
5. Proofreading before turning in a paper. Along those lines..remembering that you don’t turn off the grammar and spelling switch just because you are in a class other than English.
6.Expressing evidence-based opinions. I often get students who tell me they are unsure what that means.
The essays I assign are obviously a lot longer than five paragraphs. But I think some of the skills that help students write six or twenty-page essays are similar to those employed to write five-paragraph essays. They definitely would have helped some of the students with an essay test they took recently. So, in the humble opinion of this one instructor, I think that what you are doing can, at the very least, help prepare students for postsecondary education.