I agree with you that learning should be the goal. And any busy work that doesn't help should be eliminated. But I just don't know if we know what the right structure should be and if we can say for sure that things like writing essays don't actually help students cultivate their writing and critical thinking skills.
I hated writing essays in school, because the assignment was always "reproduce a work of writing that adheres to the arbitrary standards of the institution for grading purposes". Great writing can't be graded, as its value is entirely subjective.
As an example, here's an assignment that I might have completed under duress, vs. one that I'd complete voluntarily for fun:
"Explain how the theme of Chaos is expressed in Slaughterhouse Five. Use at least five supporting examples from the text and cite your references MLA style. Four pages minimum."
"Convince your best friend that Slaughterhouse Five is a terrible novel. Cite the text any way you please, ideally by comparing it to a book you think is actually good."
Whatever I produced for the first prompt can be graded by ticking off boxes and looking at my grammar; whatever I produced for the second prompt would need a thorough investigation of my own writing style and a framework of grading that takes into account my own voice as an author.
(To be clear--I don't think that giving my prompt in a modern classroom would immediately inspire students. They are far too burdened by the entire system for a single change to fix their experience. I am merely discussing the difference between "pointless essays" and "essays that authors care about".)
This reminds me of a moment that has stuck with me for a long time. Some time in the early 00s, I was wondering around town with a friend fairly late at night. We watched a waste truck picking up outside a building, there were stacks of Yellow Pages piled up, as they had just been delivered everywhere, like they used to.
My friend and I joked that they could have saved on transport and fuel by backing up the recycling trucks directly to the printing presses.
So I appreciate your point.
But I also remember being a student forced to churn out mindless formulaic essays with length and structure requirements. I hated it. I never liked writing until I finally had one good English teacher in high school who assigned and graded in the way you say is infeasible.
If a teacher doesn't have the bandwidth/capacity/skill/etc. to teach English well, maybe they should find something else to do instead of torturing students with mind-numbing assignments.
Teachers with fifty students shouldn’t be assigning essays. There is no way for them to read them, which means they’ll grade by scanning for key words. That destroys the pedagogical value of an essay, this post’s point.
At my university, assignments were primarily used for guided learning - most of the grade came from the exam. If you cheat on the learning, you either don't _need_ to learn to pass the exam (meaning you should have a way to fast track), or you're asking to fail the exam, which hurts no one but yourself.
Maybe it's different in other schools? Cause I don't fully get the "Good." argument based on my experience. YMMV.
There's grading and evaluating. Writing something you know won't be read, except for the purpose of being scolded for missing key words, is close to useless pedagogically. Someone motivated enough to learn from that (a) didn't need the assignment and (b) deserves better.
The second half of your argument is incredibly common, although I don't begrudge you for making it. Yes, it's true that teaching effectively and creatively is near-impossible given the current setup and demands of the modern education system. This should tell most people something about the worthiness of the modern system, but instead most of them defend it.
I took a very difficult gatekeeper exposition class at a famously rigorous university a few years ago and loved it. We had to write a ton, but I didn't mind it because when you're learning to write, you need to write a ton. And boy did we. But not all classes there were like that! Some classes, mostly classes about writing were deemed "writing intensive," but others would require little more than a few pages here and there. The standard for that scant output extremely high and the intellectual critique was often blistering; the teacher concentrated on the subject matter instead of combing 50 paragraphs for split infinitive.
Currently, I attend a significantly less rigorous university as a full-time undergrad. I have 5 classes, including an elective on the history of a particular art form. The final will be a 10 page paper and 20 minute presentation preceded by a 2 page proposal. While this class requires significantly less written output than the exposition class, the assignment will still take an disproportionate amount of my time. The teacher has many students and no TA, so each paper will receive a cursory intellectual critique, but primarily graded on format and grammar. I'll not likely have learned more than if I'd written a really tight 2/3 page paper that got several serious critiques along the way.
Well... I have a lot of problems with this, on both sides of the fence.
Provocative start: How about we give up the idea that students are producing great work?
I mean, I imagine teachers think of the exercises they give as skills development.
One of the skills to develop is technical writing.
Surely beginning students do not know how to cite textual examples to back up their arguments. Understanding the role of evidence in making an argument should be fundamental to democracy. (Understanding that we are not living in that world recently in the US.) So they need to practice.
Choosing the theme is another skill. I don't have anything to say about it, but I don't have a problem with teachers asking students to try to figure something out before they write about it.
Almost all teachers are well ahead of you on this one. Far rarer is the belief that students are capable of great work. This is, in fact, my central point: if all of your assignments are bounded by the need for administrative convenience, creativity and originality cannot flourish.
Teaching writing through dry, separate "skills development" exercises is like teaching basketball as follows:
"Today we'll practice jumping from one ankle to the other. Today we'll practice reading a point guard centric offense. Today we'll be working on our vertical jump height. Now for the exam: demonstrate a cut behind the center and a layup. Hmm, your second step is slow, you get a C."
I am arguing that if you want to teach basketball, your students need to play a lot of basketball. Exercises will only really help them once they've experienced the game and have a burning internal desire to compete.
Well. I played basketball since 7th grade. Not just played, trained 3 days a week. Before you can really play you have to master certain elements, otherwise it's just fooling around. And at first we trained all those elements separately. Balance, switching feet, turning. Just turning without the ball. Faster, slower. Jumping from left foot, from right. Catching the ball. Throwing it. Passing. Alone, with partner, against the wall. Hook shot, but just up, up, up, get the ball up. Hook from left, from right. Then hook standing directly below hoop. Left, right, left, again. Then adding movement. Over and over again. And then actually playing.
I assure you that the instruction only works when the student wants to experience the final form, and they will not get any sense of what the final form is until they have "fooled around" and have an actual desire to learn the sport. At every level of their progression they need time to experience unstructured performance for fun. The same is true for writing.
Kids love to write when they're young and no one's hovering over their shoulders grading them. It's only once they get hit with the five-paragraph essays and the term papers and the dry grammar exercises that they learn to avoid writing, and associate it with boredom and stress.
The two prompts motivate the writer to practice two completely different skillsets; they're really not comparable.
The first one is focused more on the fundamentals of close reading and analysis. The writer needs to understand what the theme of "chaos" means, then closely read the novel or review their notes to identify literary devices or techniques that theme, and then tie it together in a "report". It requires the assignee to practice very basic skills... it's technical practice, not artistry.
The second prompt is the artistry - it's an assignment in discourse or rhetoric. The thing is, it's not possible to successfully execute the second prompt unless you've mastered the techniques from the first prompt. Beyond constructing logical or emotional arguments that may be tailored to your audience (your best friend), you still have to collect evidence from the novel. It might not be a list of literary devices, but if one of your arguments was that the book was poorly and confusingly written, you would still probably need to collect evidence of specific passages that support your claim. The whole point of the first prompt is to build the skill to do this, but with some hand-holding/constraints for practice.
I won't defend page limits, but even the reference style mandate is important because it has implications for how you actually write the essay. I deal with technical stakeholders all the time, and the amount of time that we could clear up issues if someone would just properly cite a reference can be ridiculous... perhaps those stakeholders were the teenagers who didn't bother to follow the citation guidelines for their literature class?
As a teenage musician, I hated drilling my scales and etudes. Why bother when practice was limited and I had cool ensemble and solo rep to learn? What I didn't understand and appreciate at the time is that all the technical drudgery serves a very real purpose. Most of the existing pedagogy is directly pulled from, based on, or references real repertoire which you'll undoubtedly encounter in your musical career.
All those scales in intervals? Well, you can't even begin to make a complex passage musical if you can't execute the technique! Arpeggios in weird fingering/shifting patterns? Turns out that some very exposed orchestral passage necessitates that you use an oddball fingering because it's just not practical to do anything else in context. That entire development section in the concerto you need to cram for an audition? Good thing that one of your etudes book was effectively variations and embellishments on that section, so you can lean on muscle memory and focus on making it sound nice!
Essay writing is much the same. No matter what I'm writing - an e-mail, a project proposal, a performance review, whatever - I'm trying to communicate a point. That means constructing an argument and supplying evidence. And doing so in a way that your audience will grok without any additional intervention. You build this skill by practicing, sometimes in ways that seem dumb, boring, and disconnected from reality. Not every pedagogy is ground so well in reality as my music example, but I can't imagine that the cynical take that it's all purely to automate grading is a rational take on things.
The opposite is true for my math. I enjoyed algebra as a kid and hated trig and calculus. Now I am much more interested in calculus and don't like algebra algebra.
Sometimes there's different ways to learning, I have no idea.
Ah wouldn't it be fantastic if school essays were more like proving to your boss that you followed the spec to the letter and less like... Following the spec to the letter.
That's the difference and it makes all the difference.
It's worth noting that the same skills the "version 1" essay is supposed to teach should be helpful if all you need to do is compile a checklist and save yourself the hassle of argument.
I think what ends up happening in reality, at least, in my experience, is that you Google "Slaughterhouse Five chaos" and trawl the first several pages of results looking for information you can essentially copy+paste into your essay (with slight adjustments to get around automatic plagiarism scanners, of course).
I did still demonstrate some kind of skill, maybe research and the ability to condense information from many sources down into a single piece of work, but those weren't the skills you mention, and it was definitely not what the teacher was intending for me to do.
The second prompt the person you responded to runs into the same issues (I can Google "Slaughterhouse Five reviews"), but at the very least probably feels like a more engaging and compelling essay prompt to the student.
The second prompt would have sent me spinning, panic, want to run.
The first prompt, while being 'technical' and not what a future 'writer' would like to do at that point can be somewhat mechanically achieved and while I still wouldn't have liked it, I would begrudgingly do it and it probably helped me overall. It mentions using certain 'techniques' you would've learned about in class. I can apply that. They want a specific number of pages at minimum so that I don't just write 5 sentences to cover the 5 examples, sure, whatever.
Like learning math. You gotta learn the basics, learn the multiplication tables by heart. Do the same "compute (-7^2*13-7)+5/5" style exercises over and over. It teaches attention to detail and memorizing and following simple rules. If you can't do that it is very unlikely that a "closer to reality" question that someone that will later go on to become a mathematician would like working on instead would not send you into panic mode.
You would like them to execute the second prompt in a way that demonstrates the skills that the first prompt calls for. They won't. They'll just take the second prompt, and communicate exactly the same way that they already do to their friends, with similar skills and language. The result may be persuasive - particularly to their friends - but it won't develop analytic skills.
Assign the second prompt, and I guarantee you’ll get something like this as a submission:
“Bro, the novel sucks. Trust me.”
You can’t even give this a bad grade, based on the prompt. You can't say it’s not convincing, because they’ll say “you’re not my friend, this would convince my friend”
You can’t say it’s too short, because they’ll say you didn’t provide a minimum.
You can’t say it didn’t cite the novel, because you said to do whatever.
You can’t say it didn’t compare to other literature, because you said “ideally”.
Lesson 1 of being a teacher: give the students an inch and they will take a mile.
Teaching students is not unlike programming computers, in that they both take instructions very literally. If you are vague with a computer program, you know ahead of time because the program doesn’t compile.
If you are vague with an assignment you don’t know until you get it back. The more vague the assignment, the wider the variety of submissions. If you don’t tell them the font face you get a cursive one. If you don’t tell them the font size you get huge and tiny. If you don’t tell them the margins you get wide and thin.
So even if you would personally make a good faith effort at this assignment, it’s really better for everyone to be specific and follow the same format.
One of the reasons they hate school and don't want to be there is that they are compelled to do pointless, grinding busywork, all day, every day. That's why they're using GPT-3 to fake their essays. Even three hours of reprieve from the system is worth cheating and dishonesty, and all the better if it helps their GPA.
I harbor no beliefs that a teacher can walk into the modern school system with a creative, exciting lesson plan and inspire students to perform. The system is broken and fundamentally flawed. It cannot be fixed. You are certainly correct that the best way to get consistent results out of your institutionalized students is to grade to a rigorous, clear format, but in doing so you've only played your part in reinforcing the exact system that drives them to cheat with GPT-3.
I'd say it's a mix of both.
> That's why they're using GPT-3 to fake their essays.
I'm not actually sure about the motivation for most students. For students who I've caught using copilot on assignments, it's not because of the reasons you cite. Maybe it is for others.
> It cannot be fixed.
The main improvement that would fix most of this is to have higher teacher to student ratios. That alone would be a massive improvement, because then teachers would have time to engage students at a different level of attention.
Having taught writing in universities over a six-year-long stint, my experience agrees with yours.
Pragmatically, the reasons the assignments are structured they way they are isn't because bad faith by instructors, but rather because of the needs of students.
I don't blame the students-- they have a lot of shit going on.
At the same time, you're absolutely correct that making assignments in the general form we see them has more to do with what students actively demand: they absolutely do not want the kind of assignment suggested by the GP because anything other than a list of boxes to check causes profound anxiety in students.
Our comment threads here are excellent examples of what short writing prompts and assessments could look like, and I've gotten invaluable feedback on my writing from participating in internet threads. In this form of writing, there are distinct grades in the form of karma. And there are real stakes for communication, as I can easily fail to get my points across or even upset people. I even sometimes get useful responses that improve my understanding of the world or some topic.
As useful as that practice can be, if I had my academic advancement tied to these prompts it would cause me a great deal of stress: how the hell do I know in which contexts someone will read any given post?
In the context of the general internet I have a lot of easy ways out. I don't have to listen to dumb people, the poorly informed, or malicious trolls.
In the context of a classroom, I can't just tell the teacher "that's just, like, your opinion, man" because they are going to write down a letter and that's going to make my life easier or harder.
I'm not a big fan of contemporary education for reasons I could develop in book-length diatribes (I quite a PhD during my dissertation), but I get where students are coming from when they demand some clarity on how they are being assessed.
Meanwhile, your prompt sounds like hell. And is far more subjective than the previous one.
> Convince your best friend that Slaughterhouse Five is a terrible novel.
So, before you even start the assignment, you let the teachers dictate the position that someone has? And you're not going to teach students to assess themes in books, so what will they judge Slaughterhouse Five on, aesthetics?
> Cite the text any way you please
Why on earth would you change that requirement. "Cite the text using method X" is a direct analog to "Coding standards dictate this naming convention". I would fire a "free thinker" who refused to adhere to the, sometimes arbitrary, standards for communication with the rest of group. Standards are good.
> ideally by comparing it to a book you think is actually good."
As a rule, I don't think convincing someone that a work of art is "terrible" should be done by comparing it to something else you "think is good".
> [No page limit]
You can trust an adult with that, but a seventh grader? Usually they need a page limit to encourage them to write more.
It seems like the following a complete essay that you would have to grade very well: "Slaughterhouse Five's lack of elves makes it terrible, because fantasy novels are just better and books like the Lord of the Rings have elves which makes it a good book [Source - My conversation with Johnny yesterday]"
Grading that well would be bad because it's horrible in every way.
School is not about doing great work. It's about learning the tools which you can use to do great work. School does not ask you to do novel research, and so it doesn't ask you to write novel essays.
We have no compatible ideas if you insist upon this being the case. School is not "training for real life", it is real life.
The thought that it's appropriate and desirable to monopolize the bulk of the time, mental health, and attention of young people in order to keep them from attempting anything of consequence while they "prepare to do more work later" is deleterious to society.
(It is also not true that real writers know the rules by heart and choose to break them for their own effect. That implies that there is a real set of rules that people agree on and that every great writer is capable of producing a standardized set of writing that follows these rules. In fact, most great writers take great pains to tell personal stories of failure in school due to an inability and unwillingness to comply with their teachers, and this has been true since antiquity.)
Note the section on Body paragraph structure -- that doesn't begin to cover how structured the resulting essays were. I can still remember my daughter sing-songing "T, CD CM CM, CD CM CM, CD CM CM, SC." Every essay had to follow that exact pattern. Every commentary sentence had to start with the approved list of words, and likewise the concluding sentence.
It's entirely about how easy it is for the teacher to grade, and has nothing to do with teaching students to actually write. It was awful, and I did everything I could, including contacting the Jane Shaffer people, to criticize it and push back.
A great many people cannot fathom the fundamental truth that the majority of learning is useful simply because it allows us to enjoy to process of living in society for 70-90 years and for no other reason. There isn't any greater purpose to being "good at writing" other than "it makes communication and competition more accessible and convenient", but even that is a subjective value judgement. There are many sub-cultures who exist even inside our own that are perfectly happy being sub-literate.
A lot of people are saying "if kids don't learn dry, boring technical writing, then how will they write work emails and documentation?" The implication there is that if you can't write proper emails and documentation, you'll fail at your career. If the emails and documentation I receive are at all representative of greater industry (and I've worked in both aerospace and clinical research) then I can assure everyone that few people can write at a useful level and not only are they still employed but their companies are still around.
Given that no one can write anyway, why do we cling to forcing children through painful, humiliating exercises in standardization?
The first prompt requires the reader to critically analyze the book, by first requiring them to give it a charitable interpretation.
It is said that you cannot disagree with someone if you're unable to explain their position yourself in a clear and definitive manner. Obviously, what are you disagreeing with if you don't even understand what's the ideas behind the thing you disagree with.
That's what the first prompt would be about teaching you, to be able to understand other people's ideas and concepts, to look past your initial judgements and bias, give it a charitable interpretation, demonstrate you understood all this by summarizing the idea in a 4 page essay of your own, with supporting references to tie it back to the source, showing the source does in fact argue for these itself.
Once you can do that, you have gained the right to go on with your own disagreement and write that essay, which would be your second prompt. Though honestly, your second prompt seems to be geared more towards discussing the entertainment aspect of the book, and not the ideas and concepts it contains, so again it's not that much about critical thinking, because critically there's little to argue about a "I prefer the color red over blue."
Personally I think you were trying to get at something else, maybe your point was just, come up with assignments students enjoy and can have fun with?
I think this is always true, but some things are just boring to some students, maybe you just don't enjoy reading, writing or even critical thinking, or any of that stuff. I don't know if there's much you can do in that situation. Maybe the solution is more fluid classes, let people move at their own pace, pick their own areas of interests, even if that's directly going to a trade, skipping on literature entirely, etc.
The first prompt presumes to pick what was important about the book, mandate the form by which the book will be analyzed, and set up a minimum amount of effort before the writer can quit.
The second prompt picks a very general bit of opinion and then demands an open-ended argument requiring original thought. In fact, it's even better if the reader liked the book, because it forces them to write as if they didn't, and opens them to the possibility of a satirical essay.
(Note that I am aware that an average modern student wouldn't like the second prompt any more than the first, but that has to more with the system than the prompt. I'm speaking about the pure act of teaching an interesting writer to write well.)
Critical thinking requires both the desire and ability to think outside of frameworks that were predetermined by authority. This is part of the reason that modern schools are so bad at "teaching critical thinking skills". The most basic form of critical thinking, in fact the first openly critical thought that students have about learning--"this is a waste of my time"--is suppressed for the convenience of the administration.
> Maybe the solution is more fluid classes, let people move at their own pace, pick their own areas of interests, even if that's directly going to a trade, etc.
I could not agree with this more. I believe that 'school' should be life-long, year-round, and optional. Ideally we'd go in and out of some type of formal education until we died. However, this level of societal flexibility is directly incompatible with modern school.
Of course all essays shouldn't be written exactly this way, but for students just learning about writing long form, it is a brilliant stepping stone to get the basics down. Too many students—and readers—can't differentiate between a "concrete detail" or statement of fact, and "commentary material" or statement of opinion. This method helps to distinguish them.
Length is used as some proxy for rigor, but we know it's only a proxy.
One issue for me in English was I really was not interested in the kinds of essays the English teachers were interested in having us write, eg coming up with a thesis on plot themes in Shakespeare. Just not my thing and so I couldn’t get anywhere in those classes.
When I write today, for work, the challenge is always to write less. My VP might have time to read two pages; he's almost certainly not going to read anything longer.
Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities https://www.amazon.com/Why-They-Cant-Write-Five-Paragraph/dp...
Writing is generally good. Expressing yourself is good. Analysis and critique are good. The artificial essay is useless.
All it did was teach kids how to write boring simple sentences to meet the implicit "punctuation quota". An equal amount of content compacted into a couple of complex/compound sentences would actually result in marks off.
1. Start with a hook. Engage the reader.
2. Present the ideas (2-3) that you will be discussing in the essay. Have you ever read a rambling blog post? Yeah, they suck. There's no direction and you don't retain much.
Also, 2-3 ideas in one essay is a great number. There's all those studies that say we can only hold 5 things in working memory at once, blah blah blah. Keeping the essay focused on a few core ideas helps the reader retain them better, and the writer to have a well defined scope.
3. Extrapolate the concise ideas in 2-3 concise paragraphs. Ever read a rambling blog post? Yeah, they suck. Telling students to keep paragraphs in 3-5 sentences helps the essay communicate the ideas in a concise manner.
It also helps block out the text in small visually appealing blocks. Ever read super condensed very long paragraphs? Yeah, they suck. It helps to break up your thoughts with some whitespace. (It's almost like coding benefits from this as well...)
4. Conclude your essay. Reiterate what you wanted to cover. This helps the reader retain the ideas, and it allows the author to tie up the ideas in a nice bow. I love when I finish a book or essay and everything comes together and reaffirms what I've been reading the whole time.
This format is not only great building blocks, but it helps you write larger volumes. If you repeat these small steps several times, you create chapters. If you repeat these steps on a macro level, the chapters tie together into a cohesive piece of literature.
These unnecessary "quotas" may sound meaningless, but a lot of people have thought very hard about how to create basic building blocks writers can follow. These building blocks allow the writers to create concise, well formed arguments. "Boring simple sentences" are extremely conducive to clear and concise writing. I'll take boring sentences that form complex ideas over complex fluff that describes nothing any day. (This is almost analogous to good code design too, weird...)
Maybe it's a matter of opinion, but I believe that the grading process is a sufficient guardrail. When the theories are made rigid, it's usually just to ease the grading. I'm okay with that in the right context. In this instance, however, I think it's self-defeating.
Most people will not become scientists. Those who do can quickly pick up the additional burden of formatting requirements, when necessary.
If you want to teach conformity to arbitrary and seemingly pointless strictures, the rest of the public education system does that already.
I wouldn't say that the purpose of the 5-paragaph essay is to teach clear writing. It serves the same purpose as mandating a format for a conference; no format mandate means you get N formats, which makes evaluating them much harder.
;-)
Feedback is obviously invaluable, but the point of grades, as used today, is solely to gatekeep who are allowed access to the next level of education. So instead of constructive feedback, it has become a set of filters entirely divorced from actual learning.
(And yes, I got good grades, I just hate that so many people I know were denied opportunities based on a shitty system, wildly not fit for purpose)
If the goal is wrong, perhaps just don't do it, but... "it's on you to show that it's the best way". I don't get it.
If I want to see that a student has writing skills, I would think expecting them to write is somewhat definitional?
Maybe it's on someone else to 'show' a better way to demonstrate writing skills that doesn't involve writing.
This is a fine goal. Having “someone write, say, 8 pages” is not, it’s a task, and a tedious one at that. No good writer starts with a page goal. It’s a common criticism by great writer’s of bad publishers.
Again, it's been awhile since I've been in middle/high school, so it may have changed some.