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

by John Warner

In packaging the findings of much of this seminal research into a consumer-friendly package, Pink argues that motivation hinges on three conditions: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

Autonomy means having sufficient freedom to pursue our own curiosities driven by individual desires. Mastery means we are motivated by a desire to achieve goals of our own design, and equally important, to have experiences that reinforce this desire along the way. The importance of mastery suggests the doing (process) is as important as or more important than the having done (the product). Purpose means we believe what we are doing is important and meaningful to ourselves, to the world at large, or both. A moment’s reflection reveals the simple truth of these ideas. Any successful person has likely lived them.

Gritology: Hype at Work Recently, Mischel’s “self-control” has seen a resurgence and repackaging in the form of “grit.” Grit is the domain of Dr. Angela Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who defines the term this way: “Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”12 In her research, Dr. Duckworth has discovered that those who are “grittier” (as measured by a self-reported quiz), are more successful, whether it be in mastering algebra, navigating plebe year at West Point, or maintaining a successful marriage. The potential applications to education are obvious. If children can be made grittier, they will be more likely to become successful adults. The story of grit follows the education-fad hype cycle. Duckworth and her philosophy of grit were first widely popularized by journalist Paul Tough in his bestselling book from 2012, How Children

Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character, which yoked together various strains of behaviorist teaching and presented them as far more important to student success than intelligence or native ability.13 The narrative is seductive. On the surface it is egalitarian: not all of us are born with the same ability, but anyone can learn the sorts of character traits that translate to success. It also fits in with our long-standing cultural favoring of “hard work” and “stick-to-itiveness.” The hype cycle kicks in.

Unfortunately, there’s a rub. As of yet, we don’t know how to teach social-emotional learning skills like grit. Who says so? Angela Duckworth.

The other problem is similar to the emphasis on standardized tests in math and reading: character education of this stripe reduces education to “college- and career-readiness.” On the surface, this is an admirable goal, but when student agency and autonomy is lost in the process, not only are we preparing them poorly for the rigors of college, where resilience is not going to be enforced by teachers, we are closing off other arenas where these admirable character traits may be on display.

Education researcher and activist Ira Socol argues that children from less privileged backgrounds need not “grit” but “slack.” For children who must display grit in their day-to-day lives, Socol believes schools should be places of “abundance” where they can experience the kind of freedom and opportunity people from more privileged backgrounds take for granted.22

Technological solutions to the problems of learning value a “frictionless” experience, but we shouldn’t forget that friction makes heat and heat is energy. As Bernard Fryshman, a professor of physics with fifty years of experience, says, one of faculties’ most important roles is to “jostle students into active learning.”15

Berger describes the concept of personalized learning as starting with what you think kids need to learn, “measuring” the kids to place them on a “map,” where everything they know is behind them, and “everything in front of them is what they need to learn next.” From the array of “learning objects” the algorithm will select a lesson, the child will complete it, they will be retested

(“measured”) again. If they pass the measurement, they move on. If not, they try again with something “simpler.” Berger once believed that if this process was used by “millions of kids” the “algorithms would get smarter and smarter, and make better, more personalized choices about which things to put in front of kids.”

The driving value of all of these teaching machines is “efficiency,” but it is difficult to reconcile the value of “efficiency” with learning. Education is an ongoing process, not a product, and what we learn as we stumble off the path is often more valuable than when we are toeing the line. Do we value “efficiency” in our relationships with our families? Is our most profound love “efficient?”

For example, consider a basic assignment in a college first-year writing course: an article summary. The goal is for the student to read the argument of another writer, and then distill that argument to its essence while hewing as closely to the original writer’s meaning as possible. If a

writer cannot accurately convey the ideas of others, they will not be able to use those ideas to shape their own expression. The students I have worked with over the years often struggle with this assignment. In their previous experiences, many of them have been asked to prove comprehension at the level of “I have read and genuinely understood the broad subject of this article.” They have rarely been required to distill or synthesize an argument to its essence, a higher order task than mere comprehension. They are comfortable repeating what they’ve heard/read but less experienced in articulating what a text “means.”

Put another way, they’ve spent a lot of time examining trees without being required to describe the forest.

Student difficulties with argument summary tend to cluster around a few common issues. Some paraphrase rather than summarize, essentially repeating the original piece idea to idea in the order of appearance. Ideally, a summary should be significantly shorter than the original—it is meant to be an aid to understanding for those who do not know the text being summarized—so a line-by-line paraphrase doesn’t work. I often restrict students’ first attempt at summary to three hundred or so words, significantly shorter than what they’re summarizing. Some students hit the word count having dealt with only the first few paragraphs. Having been conditioned to locate their thesis at the end of the first paragraph, they sometimes assume the same is true of all writing, but in much of the more sophisticated texts they’ll read in a typical first-year writing course, the thesis may be implied rather than explicit.

Some students looking for a thesis to summarize search for a sentence to extract and quote, but not finding it, they settle for something they know isn’t right, believing they should do what they’ve done before anyway. Other studen...

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If a student has missed the argument by a good margin, we may have a reading comprehension issue; they simply didn’t understand the text to begin with.

The student who lacked background on

the subject needs help on a process of active reading, where they act to identify their own gaps of knowledge and fill them in with additional, lateral reading. I may model this behavior for the student through my own practice.

One of the consistent frustrations my students have with my teaching style is a tendency to answer their questions with questions that point them back toward their own writing. I aim to be a sounding board, but ultimately if they are going to learn to write, they must engage in the struggle themselves.

We should not ask students to write anything that will not be read.

Resolved, that the National Council of Teachers of English affirm the position that the use of isolated grammar and usage exercises not supported by theory and research is a deterrent to the improvement of students’ speaking and writing and that, in order to improve both of these, class time at all levels must be devoted to opportunities for meaningful listening, speaking, reading, and writing; and that NCTE urge the discontinuance of testing practices that encourage the teaching of grammar rather than English language arts instruction.2

“I have found over and over again that they over-edit themselves from the moment they sit down to write. They report thoughts like ‘Is this right? Is that right?’ and ‘Oh my god, if I write a contraction, I’m going to flunk.’ Focused on being correct, they never give themselves a chance to explore their ideas or ways of expressing those ideas.”5

Correctness is simply not a value any working writer would even recognize as important. Joan Didion, one of the greatest prose stylists of the last fifty years, says: “Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power. To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed.”6

postsecondary writing: Sound writing instruction emphasizes the rhetorical nature of writing. Sound writing instruction considers the needs of real audiences. Sound writing instruction recognizes writing as a social act. Sound writing instruction enables students to analyze and practice with a variety of genres. Sound writing instruction recognizes writing processes as iterative and complex. Sound writing instruction depends upon frequent, timely, and context-specific feedback to students from an experienced postsecondary instructor. Sound writing instruction emphasizes relationships between writing and technologies. Sound writing instruction supports learning, engagement, and critical thinking in courses across the curriculum.

Sound writing instruction provides students with the support necessary to achieve their goals. Sound writing instruction extends from a knowledge of theories of writing (including, but not limited to, those theories developed in the field of composition and rhetoric). Sound writing instruction is provided by instructors with reasonable and equitable working conditions. Sound writing instruction is assessed through a collaborative effort that focuses on student learning within and beyond a writing course.1

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing a significant proportion of Americans that teachers were overpaid and had too much security. In reality, particularly compared to the practices in other developed countries, our K–12 teachers are considerably overworked and underpaid. All of the conditions conspiring to make school atmospheres inhospitable to student learning also make for difficult teaching atmospheres for instructors. In some ways, it is worse for instructors. Students (for the most part) aren’t at risk of being fired. Teachers in the United States spend 38 percent more time in the classroom than those in other developed countries.9 Almost half of teachers say they experience “a lot” of daily stress. As compared with other professions, teachers are “least likely to report feeling like their ‘opinions seem to count.’ ”10 As Daniel Koretz of Harvard shows in The Testing Charade, public school teachers have been subjected to year after year of shifting external demands for accountability, each change more oppressive and draconian than the last. School reform has resulted in testing regimes that have “sometimes been taken to lengths that are both absurd and cruel.”

A 2015 survey of thirty thousand teachers found their greatest source of stress was “having to carry out a stream of new initiatives—such as implementing curricula and testing related to the Common Core State Standards—without being given adequate training.”12 This combination of overwork, lack of agency, and what often feels like arbitrary assessment results in high rates of teacher burnout, which in turn leads to teacher turnover, teachers either switching schools or leaving the profession altogether. Sixteen percent of teachers per year are either quitting or switching schools, most commonly due to “dissatisfaction,” with over half citing it as an “important” reason for leaving. This dissatisfaction primarily stems from frustration over assessments and accountability.13 The negative effects of turnover are obvious. Schools absorb replacement costs as they must continually bring in new staff. Student achievement tends to be lower in schools with high turnover, and given that we know good work environments allow for better teaching and professional development, the opportunities for schools to work with a stable cadre of dedicated, mutually supportive professionals are choked off.

There is no substitute for experience in this pursuit.

Why school? What is the purpose of school? What should happen in school?

Regardless of one’s educational philosophies, there is broad agreement that students don’t learn as much or as well as they should. Cultural faith in the meritocracy seems to be holding, but in truth we have students busy competing in games that are significantly rigged for trophies already etched with other people’s names.

straightforward, and cost-effective route to improving student achievement in school is to make sure every child has access to appropriate nutrition and arrives in school having had sufficient rest.

Thirteen million children experience food insecurity—lack of access to nutritious food on a regular basis—and programs such as free lunch and breakfast only partially close these gaps.2 Hungry students are less likely to retain information, they have a more difficult time regulating their moods, they can’t concentrate, and they are more likely to experience stress. Food insecurity and homelessness does not disappear when students enter college. Twenty-two percent of college students experience “very low levels of food security” according to a 2016 report from the National Student Campaign against Hunger and Homelessness.3 Those same students have an increased likelihood of homelessness. As reported in a paper from Sara Goldrick-Rab and Katharine Broton, sociologists who study systemic barriers preventing students from achieving their higher education goals, over half of students who report experiencing homelessness were working at least thirty hours per week.4 It is hard to consider education a meritocracy when you can be working essentially full-time while still going to school and experiencing homelessness.

Dr. Wendy Troxel, a behavioral scientist and expert in sleep research, calls sleep deprivation among American teenagers “an epidemic,” with only one in ten getting the eight to ten hours of recommended sleep per night. Teenage brains are in a hyperspeed period of brain development, forming the very capacities we claim to be most important for learning—critical reasoning, problem solving, good judgment—and for those brains to grow healthy, teenagers need sleep. School days cannot start at 7 a.m. Homework should not gobble up hours upon hours of post-school time. Activities pursued in the name of boosting college applications need to be weighed against the cost of sleep deprivation and the resulting stress, anxiety, and depression.

In response, Emdin has developed a practice he calls “reality pedagogy”—“an approach to teaching and learning that has a primary goal of meeting each student on his or her own cultural and emotional turf. It focuses on making the local experiences of the student visible and creating contexts where there is a role reversal of sorts that positions the student as the expert in his or her own teaching and learning, and the teacher is the learner.”

Emdin’s “reality pedagogy” makes use of structures and techniques that involve the students themselves in shaping and defining the community in which they will be learning. As one example, Emdin employs the “cogenerative dialogue” or “cogens,” “simple conversations between the teacher and their students with a goal of co-generating/generating plans of action for improving the classroom.”

Emdin’s approach recognizes that student learners possess valid knowledge about how they best learn and are capable of being fully collaborative inside a classroom community.

List five things you can’t live

without. List five things you want to do in your life and why you want to do them. List five things you want your partner in life to be (if you want a partner). And I asked these three questions: How did what matters to you come to matter to you? (What are the roots of what you value?) How do we measure if a life “matters?” How will you know if your life “matters?”

“What did you learn?”

High school teacher Peter Greene has tracked examples of the mindset that “education’s main or sole aim is to prepare children to be the worker bees of tomorrow, to become a ‘product’ to be consumed by the future corporate overlords.”11 These are some of his examples:

Life is to be lived, including the years between five and twenty-two years old. A world that suggests those years are merely preparation for the real stuff, and the real stuff is almost entirely defined by your college and/or career, is an awfully impoverished place. Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, but neither is sleepless, stressed, and medicated.

The ability to critically consume and produce text will be a near-universal need in the United States going forward. One could argue we’ve already reached a crisis point on this front. To do better means introducing lessons in Internet literacy that extend well beyond traditional approaches to teaching and learning in academic contexts. Writing instruction will need to be the front line in helping students figure out what is shit and what is shinola.

These should be our goals: We seek to increase educational challenges while simultaneously decreasing student stress and anxiety related to writing. We seek to change the orientation of school from only preparing students (poorly, as it turns out) for the indefinite future to also living and learning in the present. We seek to provide experiences designed around learning and growth, rather than giving assignments and testing for competencies. We will end the tyranny of grades and replace them with self-assessment and reflection.

We will give teachers sufficient time, freedom, and resources to teach effectively. In return, they will be required to embrace the same ethos of self-assessment and reflection expected of students.

Nevertheless, the sentence is not the basic skill or fundamental unit of writing. The idea is.

do my best work when: I am passionate about my subject and have the freedom to write about my interests. I am knowledgeable (enough) about my subject. I can easily access research or information I don’t possess that may inform what I am writing. I have sufficient (but not too much) time to engage in a writing process appropriate to the occasion. I am sufficiently rested and mentally alert. I have an audience potentially interested in reading my writing. I have a deep understanding of the purpose of what I am writing, why I am writing it, and what effect I hope to have on the audience.

I am likely to learn something via the act of writing that I did not previously know. I am backstopped by trustworthy colleagues who edit and review my work with an eye toward enhancing the message and purpose of my writing. We can easily divide my list into the categories of resources, time, and motivation.

In Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, Helen Sword found similar attitudes among college faculty. Sword discusses the importance of the writer’s BASE—(B)ehavioral habits, (A)rtisanal habits, (S)ocial habits, and (E)motional habits—for successfully producing writing.2 Under social habits, Sword articulates the importance of writing for and with others, writing as collaborative communication. Emotional habits include cultivating pleasure as well as learning to navigate risk and resistance, traits that extend well beyond writing.