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

by John Warner

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.