Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities

by John Warner

The worst of those training wheels is the five-paragraph essay. If you do not know the form, ask the closest school-aged child or, indeed, anyone who has been through school in the past twenty or so years: 1. Paragraph of introduction ending in a thesis statement that previews the body paragraphs. 2–4. Body paragraphs of evidence supporting the thesis. 5. Conclusion that restates the thesis, almost always starting with, “In conclusion.”

To write is to make choices, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Writers choose what they want to write about, whom they want to write to, and why they’re writing.

We overestimate our own proficiency at writing. Our own writing always makes sense to us because we know what we’re trying to say, and even when our specific choices of expression don’t quite say what we mean, our brains fill in the blanks.

In her study of successful writing academics, Helen Sword identified some of the characteristics for writing that writers keep in mind as they work, things like “concision,” “structure,” “voice,” “identity,” “clarity,” “vocabulary,” “agency,” “audience,” and “telling a story.”5 When these expert writers think about the sentences themselves they consider not grammar—a word we associate with correctness—but “syntax,” the arrangement of words in the expression of an idea.

but they struggle mightily with writing tasks that ask them to synthesize and create knowledge.

Part of this is because synthesizing and creating knowledge is hard, one of those skills that takes a lot of practice.

Writing is a process that allows us to think and respond to the world at large. It must be open and exploratory, an act where we determine what we mean to say by attempting to say it.

A practice consists of four primary dimensions: Knowledge (What do doctors know?) Skills (What can doctors do?) Habits of mind (How do doctors think?) Attitudes (What do doctors believe and value about being a doctor?)

Writers continually build expertise without ever becoming expert. It is like being inside an endlessly right-scrolling game of Super Mario World—except you never get to defeat the big boss.

Students will question then why even do it?

A writer knows how to do research appropriate to the rhetorical situation. For example, if I needed to know the chief export of Bolivia, I need the ability to locate and assess the validity of a source before declaring the answer to be “natural gas.”

A writer must be able to craft sentences reflecting the meaning they intend as well as demonstrating attention to all aspects of the rhetorical situation.

A writer doesn’t really need to know how to spell anymore. We have technology handling most of that for us. You just gotta come close while not falling prey to the perils of autocorrect.

Ugh. I hate this kind of thinking.

Curiosity: the desire to know more about the world Openness: the willingness to consider new ways of being and thinking in the world Engagement: a sense of investment and involvement in learning Creativity: the ability to use novel approaches for generating, investigating, and representing ideas Persistence: the ability to sustain interest in and attention to short- and long-term projects Responsibility: the ability to take ownership of one’s actions and understand the consequences of those actions for oneself and others Flexibility: the ability to adapt to situations, expectations, or demands Metacognition: the ability to reflect on one’s own thinking as well as on the individual and cultural processes used to structure knowledge4

According to an annual survey of over eight hundred thousand students by the Gallup organization, student engagement in school drops every year from the fifth

through the eleventh grade.2 In 2016, for the first time, a majority of fifth through twelfth graders reported being either “not engaged” (29 percent) or “actively disengaged” (22 percent). Over one-fifth of all students fifth grade or older have effectively checked out of school almost entirely. This attitude is particularly evident in high school, where on a five-point scale (five meaning “strongly agree” and one meaning “strongly disagree”) eleventh graders average 3.66 when asked to respond to the statement, “In the last seven days, I have learned something interesting at school.” Fifth graders average 4.30 for the same question. Each year of school also drains some measure of “hope” out of students. Fifth graders score a 4.62 on “I know I will find a good job in the future.” That number drops to 4.20 by eleventh grade. Schooling supposedly focused on making students “college- and career-ready” instead makes students feel less certain of achieving this goal.

Unfortunately, she’s also decided that “school sucks,” but “not because it’s boring.” She expressed these thoughts in an essay published on Medium titled, “Why School Sucks (Hint: It’s Not Because It’s ‘Boring’).”3

Apps like ClassDojo are used to track every moment of student behavior and performance, sometimes displaying this information on smartboards broadcast in the classrooms themselves, for example identifying those who are successfully following directions (gold star) or those whose dogs ate their homework (frowny face).3 This real-time tracking becomes a narrative of the collective class experience, even as it is happening, as illustrated by Natasha Singer, writing about ClassDojo in the New York Times: For better or for worse, the third graders in Greg Fletcher’s class at Hunter Elementary School always know where they stand. One morning in mid-October, Mr. Fletcher walked to the front of the classroom where an interactive white board displayed ClassDojo, a behavior-tracking app that lets teachers award points or subtract them based on a student’s conduct. On the board was a virtual classroom showing each student’s name, a cartoon avatar and the student’s scores so far that week.

Two of the most important traits for students to develop to succeed at education in general, and writing in particular, are agency and resilience. Agency is simply the ability to act and think under one’s own initiative. Resilience is the ability to get up when you’ve fallen down, to learn from your own failures.

In academic matters, we track and punish (both implicitly and explicitly) too much, too often, and this tracking and punishing make students sensibly risk averse. Because we track too much and intervene from the outside too often, we don’t allow students to solve their own problems.

Real-time data makes it too tempting for authority figures to intervene before failure can even occur. The interventions are well-meaning—students are off track when they must be on task!—but the consequence is that students are simultaneously stressed out because they know they’re being watched, and too safe, because they know someone is going to catch them before they hit the ground, let alone scrape their knee.

This is a very narrow definition of scholar, one that is far more rooted in compliance than learning and education. If you ever have to ask someone if they’re paying attention, the answer is likely to be “no,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean they weren’t doing something important.

Panopticon

It gets more absurd. In October 2017, BrainCo Inc. received $15 million in funding from Chinese investors to develop their new technology, whereby “students sit at desks wearing electronic headbands that report EEG data back to a teacher’s dashboard, and that information purports to measure students’ attention levels.” Never mind that no one has any idea if it works. BrainCo’s presentation at a 2016 Consumer Electronics Show was voted the “most cringeworthy demonstration,”8 causing some to question whether BrainCo is selling digital snake oil. For what it’s worth, most neuroscientists are skeptical, but BrainCo still aims to be “the first company to quantify this invisible metric of student engagement.” It’s invisible, and yet they think they can detect it. This is a belief in technology that is nearly fantastical.

What’s More Important Than Attention? Lots of Stuff By valuing attention so highly, we crowd out other behaviors that may be critical to learning. Strategies like those used at KIPP and other “no-excuses” schools are only necessary because school is a rather grim march through proficiencies, rather than a place in which to engage with curiosities. The downside is that students who are steeped in these no-excuses experiences, despite sometimes stellar academic records, are ill prepared for the different challenges of higher education and the independent working world. Darryl Robinson, a graduate of a no-excuses charter school in Washington, DC, described his first year at Georgetown as a full scholarship student, a year when he “quickly felt unprepared and outmatched” and had to play “catch-up.” In high school Robinson “maintained good grades simply by listening to my teachers and giving them what they wanted to hear: themselves. I could go to class, pay attention, and as long as I was respectful, I stood out as a great student.” After getting a D- on his first writing assignment in his college English class, an assignment he thought he’d done well on, Robinson recognized the difference between his and his peers’ experiences:

“I did what I’d been taught growing up in school: memorize and regurgitate information. Other Georgetown freshmen from better schools had been trained to form original, concise thoughts within a breath, to focus less on remembering every piece of information, word for word, and more on forming independent ideas. I was not. I could memorize and recite facts and figures, but I didn’t know how to think for myself.”9

Darryl Robinson has been conditioned to become what sociologist Joanne Golann calls a “worker-learner.” Golann says, “The meticulous practices adopted by [no-excuses schools] to ensure academic achievement have the paradoxical effect of producing worker-learners—students who monitor themselves, hol...

The kid staring out the window daydreaming may be heading for failure—or may be conjuring the next iPhone. It is hard to know and impossible to measure, and that impossibility makes us deeply uncomfortable. But research shows that daydreaming may be a key to learning, a way for our brains to sort and process what we’ve been experiencing.

Student engagement

almost identical to the public rationale for the push to adopt the Common Core State Standards in 2012. David Coleman, the CCSS “architect,” was fond of citing ACT scores showing “only one in every four high school graduates is ready to do college-level reading, writing, science, and computation.”2 Almost thirty years, and the story has barely changed a whit.

There is little doubt that the reform efforts since A Nation at Risk have delivered few meaningful improvements. This is true even by the preferred measurements of education reformers—standardized tests. Recently, even dyed-in-the-wool supporters of testing- and accountability-based school reform have begun to recognize the limitations of standardized tests to give us meaningful feedback about what and how students

In responding to Koretz’s The Testing Charade, Rick Hess of the strongly pro-reform American Enterprise Institute admitted that “we have done a lot of genuinely stupid stuff in the name of ‘accountability,’ ” including erecting teacher evaluation systems that Hess calls “mindless, dangerous, and destructive.”4

He says, “We have mostly overplayed our hand, overstated our expertise, and outspent our moral authority by a considerable margin as we morphed from idealism to policymaking. Education reform’s policy prerogatives have transformed schooling in ways that parents don’t much like—test-based accountability, in particular, focused on just two subjects—and without clear and lasting benefits to justify them.”5

In other words, those tests were really measuring student hunger.6

Reformers approached the gaps in achievement with noble intent, believing in educational achievement as a potential leveling force in society. But putting their faith in tests and focusing their energies on “raising scores” through curricular and managerial interventions has prevented us from having a deeper and more difficult discussion about the true causes of those gaps: systemic barriers rooted in race and poverty,8 which initiatives such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top only reinforce.

The achievement gap between wealthy and poor students has actually increased during this era of school reform.9 When achievement is framed as a competition and places at the top appear scarce, inevitably those with more resources will do better. There is no rising tide lifting all boats in our approach to education reform over the last thirty years. Some students have access to seaworthy vessels while others are left swimming for their lives.

Put another way, if a single metric is deemed to be of value, all other metrics become unimportant.

As Daniel Koretz argues in The Testing Charade, this focus has steadily led to increasing perversions when it comes to instruction, weeding out supposedly extraneous subjects like art and music, and social activities such as recess, to dedicate more time to test preparation. Koretz even believes that some of the gains we do perceive in the testing may be illusory, the product of focus on test prep strategies, rather than meaningful learning.

“miracle” following Hurricane Katrina (“the best thing that happened in the education system in New Orleans,” according to Education Secretary Arne Duncan),

Even “genuine” gains in test scores may come at the expense of other important aspects of school, as test prep dominates the curriculum. It is also not incidental that the decline in student engagement with school coincides with greater emphasis on standardized tests.

Tienken argues that tests as currently employed do nothing to “diagnose learning.” They are at best “monitoring devices.” He says, “The bottom line is this: Whether you’re trying to measure proficiency or growth, standardized tests aren’t the answer.”12

We are often not consciously aware of this underlying process, but as the text works its magic, we respond as readers. With hindsight, we can closely examine the text to understand the reasons for those responses.

Make a poster of this

When Close Reading Meets Standardized Response Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree tells the story of a tree that progressively provides more and more of itself to a boy the tree “loves.” As the boy grows into a man he returns for the tree’s apples to sell, its branches to build a house, and ultimately the trunk itself for a boat, until the tree is a stump, which the “boy,” who is now an old man, finally returns to sit upon and rest.

At the conclusion, reunited with the boy, the tree was once again “happy.” A standardized test question on The Giving Tree, working from a close reading framework, might be something like: Which of the following words best explains the emotions of the tree? A. Sad B. Loving C. Happy D. Content E. Selfless The “correct” answer would be “loving” because the text explicitly says the tree “loves” the boy. “Happy” would trip up many, because it fits the conclusion of the story, but the test writers would be able to point to a line in the text that describes that tree in one moment as “happy … but not really.” Never mind that the best answer would be all of the above, even though “sad” is implicit, rather than explicit. Also never mind that how we see the tree may be significantly dependent on our individual response to the text. Meaning is created when reader and text intersect. Those intersections will be different for different readers. While The Giving Tree is a children’s story, it offers up many different avenues for response and analysis. Some see the tree as an avatar of Christ exemplifying agape, a love that is fulfilled through sacrifice and therefore exemplary. An objectivist like Ayn Rand, on the other hand, would find the tree’s behavior absurd, and in her world view, immoral.

As a child, I found the book unsettling and sad because of how thoughtlessly cruel the boy was to the tree, while others think it’s beautiful and sweet because of the tree’s willingness to sacrifice for the boy it loves. The contradictions and complexities are among the reasons The Giving Tree remains a perennial favorite. It provides something different to different readers and refuses to give up its meaning, or meanings, without significant consideration. Reducing complex texts to multiple choice questions, and believing those questions test how closely or how well a student reads, requires a willful ignoring of some of our most important human qualities. As tests are developed, countless numbers of these compromises must be made to make sure the tests are consistent or “valid” (in the statistical sense) and can be “normed” year to year. The role of a test to assess knowledge soon becomes lost. The purpose of the test is the test itself. When we judge a piece of writing we are inevitably bringing a set of unspoken and sometimes even unrecognized values to that judgment.

Subjective responses to writing are a feature, not a bug, and to be able to articulate the whys and wherefores of our subjective responses is an important critical thinking skill. But subjectivity is the enemy of standardization, so any exam assessing writing must somehow engineer as much subjectivity as possible out of the equation.

The collateral damage that extends beyond stunted student-writing abilities is perhaps worse. Curiosity and creativity are explicitly punished. Being asked to write in a variety of genres and contexts is lost. Reading itself is a chore, and students

are asked to decode bits that seem trivial, rather than responding to whole texts or big-picture arguments as readers do.

Students in my courses are not starting from zero, but a good deal of the early part of the semester is spent unlearning everything they’ve been required to do in the past. This is a lousy way to make students “college- and career-ready.”

Unfortunately, the nuances of what the marshmallow experiment reveals about children and behavior is lost in the shuffle. The limits of the marshmallow test as predictive of future outcomes are significant. Follow-up studies revealed underlying complexities to children’s responses to the marshmallow test. Researchers realized that in some cases the results of the marshmallow test actually reflected how often children experience adults breaking faith with children. If you live in an unstable situation and are promised future rewards that never come, you would be foolish to turn down a reward that was right in front of you.3

Other studies comparing children from different cultures also demonstrate the limits of this kind of experiment to tell us something meaningful and actionable. Children from the Nso community in Cameroon who live without modern conveniences such as water and electricity and who are expected to play a role in raising younger siblings “rocked” the marshmallow test as compared to children from Germany.4

The burden of implementing this new curriculum falls entirely on teachers via administrative diktat. Nothing is removed from teachers’ responsibilities to make way for this additional requirement, although many things naturally fall by the wayside. Teachers are to be held accountable for how their students perform on these new metrics while being given very little if any assistance in implementing these new programs.