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What they write doesn’t make sense! I can’t even understand the sentences, let alone the message! I have to redo everything! And why do they keep saying “plethora”?
What is it then? “They’re doing exactly what we’ve trained them to do; that’s the problem.”
Training wheels actually prevent young riders from practicing the most important skill for riding a bike: balance.
When it comes to teaching writing, we’ve been doing something similar, giving students training wheels that actively work against their ability to learn how to write. The worst of those training wheels is the five-paragraph essay.
Students arrive in my college first-year writing class well familiar with what they’ve been told are the rules of good writing, most of which come in the form of prohibitions: Never use “I” in a sentence. Never use contractions. No fewer than three and no more than five sentences per paragraph. No fewer than five and no more than nine words per sentence.
noooooooooooooo!
Sitting before me in their first-year college writing class, my students are ready to get their next set of rules, prepped for the authority figure to describe the circumference and height of the hoop I would like them to jump through, worried because this is college and I may also set the hoop on fire.
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.
Instead, much of the writing students are asked to do in school is not writing so much as an imitation of writing, creating an artifact resembling writing which is not, in fact, the product of a robust, flexible writing process.
By trying to guide students toward “proficiency” or “competency,” we wind up providing them with rules and strictures that cut students off from the most important and meaningful aspects of writing. In order to be judged “proficient,” students are coached to create imitations that pass muster on a test a grader may take all of three minutes to read, or even worse, a test that’s assessed by a computer algorithm on the lookout for key words and phrases.
What do we do when this is how students are being evaluated for graduation and district/teacher performance on the basis of these kinds of tests?
This is how we teach students to write. Don’t be a writer, we tell them, just do some things that make it look like you know how to write. And when in doubt, at least sound smart by using words like ubiquitous and plethora. If you want to really show off, try myriad.
Very few express ever having enjoyed any act of writing.
Depressing AF
Writing is hard.
Writing is a skill, developed through deliberate practice.
We overestimate our own proficiency at writing.
human. Students should learn to correct these errors because writing clearly and correctly is important, but being human isn’t a sign of catastrophic defect. We often judge students on writing they have not been given the time to polish against standards against which we would never consider holding ourselves.
We overestimate our past proficiency at writing.
We hold students to wrong/unreasonable standards. Student writing tends to be judged against a standard of “correctness” and resemblance to a kind of “standard” academic writing that doesn’t actually exist in nature, the making of which bears little resemblance to the process writers employ when confronted with genuine writing tasks.
Skill-wise and ability-wise, students today are about like students of any other era. In fact, studies show that the “error rate” in student writing has been largely consistent over time, and students today make no more errors than those in 1917, when smartphones were surely not a distraction and texting and Snapchat hadn’t allegedly rotted anyone’s brain.6
Today’s average student is often proficient at imitations of writing that pass muster for school, 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. But the bigger problem is that they aren’t practicing those skills in school. We have students who are highly literate in many ways, but we do not allow them to translate that literacy into the kind of writing that reflects the underlying values of humanistic study.
CCP in a nutshell!
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. Increasingly, writing is a public and even collaborative act, but school often keeps ideas walled off from the world, shared only between student and teacher, and sometimes only shared between student and an anonymous grader.
In fact, what you’re reading obscures many realities of a writer’s practice. By the time a book-buying (or -borrowing) audience sees these words I will have revised, edited, and polished them several times.1 Trusted readers will have offered feedback. An editor at the publisher will weigh in with his own thoughts. A copyeditor will help polish everything to the highest possible shine. In fact, what I am typing in my initial drafts and what you read in the final version may be quite different in the wording and presentation, even as the idea I’m trying to express remains constant.
The first attitude all writers must embrace is, in the words of Jeff O’Neal, one-time writing teacher and now CEO of online publication group Riot New Media, “You are going to spend your whole life learning how to write, and then you are going to die.”
Early on, that frame may be quite small, and when we require students to write too far outside that frame, their writing skills may appear wanting, when in reality the students are struggling because they don’t have anything to say.
The writing-related tasks we frequently visit upon students would prove difficult for even highly experienced writers. Writing on subjects with which we’re newly familiar, in forms that are foreign, and addressed to audiences that are either undefined or unknown (other than “for the teacher”) bears little resemblance to the way we write for the world.
The five-paragraph essay is an artificial construct, a way to contain and control variables and keep students from wandering too far off track. All they need are the ideas to fill in the blanks. It is very rare to see a five-paragraph essay in the wild; one finds them only in the captivity of the classroom.
THIS.
The five-paragraph essay has taken root for explicable reasons, even if they are not good ones. They are easy to teach for the purposes of passing standardized assessments. The standardization makes them easier to assign and grade for teachers who are burdened with too many students. If the alternative is no writing at all, surely the five-paragraph essay is better. And perhaps it is. Many of the form’s proponents claim that once students master these basics they can then “play around with them,” but we have little evidence that this happens. It certainly isn’t in evidence in the first-year
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I can declare some general truism about what makes a good piece of writing, but until students discover this truism on their own, often by doing the opposite and seeing the negative result, it tends to have little currency or impact.
Our incentives align against teaching students to write (and think), and instead favor a performance of proficiency.
Students are not coddled or entitled. They are defeated.
We’re supposed to believe that education is empowering, a journey during which students develop their emotional and intellectual abilities. But research shows that school has the opposite effect. From the student perspective, school is a grind, with each year a little less stimulating than the last.
Schooling supposedly focused on making students “college- and career-ready” instead makes students feel less certain of achieving this goal.
To be fair, pessimism comes with experience. Older students (hopefully) have a more nuanced understanding of the world, which makes them more likely to see the economy with less hope than a 5th grader.
Given the systems we’ve created, what incentives do students have to value “learning” over grades? None that I can see.
These alarming statistics do not mean that students are somehow defective or mentally weaker than previous generations. In reality, we have created an atmosphere that is toxic to student mental health.
As we collect more and more data about all aspects of our lives, the urge to quantify what might better be simply experienced is incredibly tempting.
We want to track “learning,” but learning is hard to quantify, since it happens inside of students and occasionally arrives after a period of delay. Any writing instructor will tell you about the email received from a student a semester, or a year, or even five years removed from a course, in which they will report, “Now I know what you meant when you talked about …” The data we can capture in education can be misleading. And as we’ll see when discussing the problem of standardization, when we let incomplete data drive our curriculum, we cause serious problems.
What are the benefits of always being on track and on task, anyway?
learning. In schools like the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) charters or other so-called no-excuses atmospheres, attention is so important that things like sitting up and tracking the speaker are mandatory behaviors, and teachers are instructed to give real-time corrections to students who do things like rest their chins on their hands.
gross
contemplation. But giving students time and space to think is a dangerous proposition when compliance is so valued. Thinking is both invisible and unknowable, and even ungovernable.
The answer is no. Attention and engagement are not synonyms.
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. Mental breaks both enhance creativity and facilitate problem solving.
For example, researchers from the University of South Carolina found that performance on a standardized math exam was correlated with the arrival of students’ families receiving their SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits. Being tested around the time of receiving the aid resulted in higher scores. If students were three or more weeks removed from their family’s receiving benefits, they scored lower. This held true even when testing the same child. In other words, those tests were really measuring student hunger.
Average scores on the SAT are almost universally correlated with household income: more income, higher scores.7 Reformers who put their faith in testing believe they are a route to meritocracy. More often, they are x-rays that reveal existing structural inequalities.
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.
Any “miracle” school likely has an alternative explanation.
This is especially true when it comes to writing, because the very nature of writing makes it impossible to standardize. Writing assessments that can withstand standardization are fundamentally incompatible with the experiences students must have in order to develop their writing practices.
The more students are subjected to high-stakes standardized testing of their writing, the less they learn.
good. However, when this aspect of reading is translated into something that fits inside a multiple choice question where only one answer is allowed, the complexity of reading is narrowed to something with considerably less impact. Because of the nature of tests, the texts must be short, both so that it doesn’t cost too much to secure the rights and because, by abbreviating the excerpts, complexity or nuance (the base materials of critical thinking) may be sanded away.
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.
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 result is what I call “pseudo-academic BS,” a bizarre and counterproductive style where ten-dollar words like “plethora,” “myriad,” and “quintessential” are sprinkled in, whether the meaning of the sentence demands it or not.
