Venting--Am I off-base here?

They are using everyday math at our school. Our SAT scores have been number one in the state with the old boring math curriculum that taught basics so OF COURSE they felt the need to change to a curriculum that almost completely avoids the basics.

The odd thing about this is I keep hearing from parents whose children never have had a problem in math really struggling under this new program.

My son is doing fine because we have been working on the basics at home for years. He is the only one who knows how to divide. The rest are trying ot figure out this program that skims over multiple ways of dividing rather than teaching one strategy to mastery.

Now, all the parents have to teach the basics at home.

All I can say to these parents is, “Welcome to my world.”

I’m not sure what real value the 5 paragraph essay has. I certainly see the value in many of what might be called the basics but the 5 paragraph essay was not a part of the first basics but was rather tacked on to ‘basic’ curriculum at a later period.

That said, I’d say as a teacher that high school is the better place to teach the 5 paragraph essay. Having taught both middle school and high school English, high schoolers are better able to master the dry intricacies of 5 paragraph essays. Teaching it to most middle schoolers is like trying to get them to wear their daddy’s pants and to make them fit too. Middle schoolers and 5 paragraph essay writing don’t fit well.

Where we’d agree is that I also believe that many basics are lightly touched on these days. Teachers are asked to cover so much. There’s so much emphasis on content information and skill development is shoved onto homework where kids are basically being asked to teach themselves. And today’s children are much more restless than children of the past - they’re living in a different world and they come to school with a very different mindset. Teachers find it harder to do the sit still no frills work with them that is skill development. Everybody wants bells and whistles these days and the basics don’t lend themselves to bells and whistles.

Curriculum descriptions are miles long. I maintain each school should have a succinct list of skills that it’s aiming for grade by grade. Rather than ‘students will understand and enumerate the causes of the French and Indian War” I’d go for - students will write a well-organized paragraph. Reading, writing and ‘rithmetic were the basics and we’ve diluted their instruction with voluminous content information.

If you ever want a sample of a list of skills expected of students grade by grade, contact the Sanford School in Hockessin, Delware. They have such a list and it all fits on two pages.

“Teachers find it harder to do the sit still no frills work with them that is skill development.”

Imagine what the employers think when the ‘kids’ graduate and still don’t know how to sit still and concentrate on their work for extended periods.

Do you know what they call a job with no stress and no production quotas?

A hobby. ;)

John

Sara,

The five paragraph essay forms the basis of almost all writing kids will be called upon to do in college. Colleges used to assume kids were taught it in high school but now they have to put them in remediation classes their first semester to teach it to them. It also provides training in how one can put one’s thoughts into writing in a clear sequential fashion—a life skill. It may well be too much for middle school, which is why high school English teachers should not shirk their duty in teaching it. And it need not be dry—certainly one can teach it in a way that could be interesting. But—and this is a big but—many teachers view it as inherently “uncreative” and so shun teaching it. My point is that this is a huge disservice, just as Linda pointed out not teaching math facts (too rote!) or how to systematically attack word problems ultimately undrmines our kids’ learning.

We parents end up having to pick up the pieces because the schools are not teaching so the kids can learn. We have to do this after our kids have had a full day of school and a load of homework and we’ve put in a full work day. All this so the teachers can thrill in the kids’ creativity? My kids are plenty creative enough already—I just want them to be taught the fundamentals so they really learn them and have a framework on which to hang all that creativity. Sorry—my utter frustration at the schools is showing.

That was one piece of the entire essay, which I read, that tries to convey how dehumanizing and dangerous the standards/testing movement really is. Bottom line is we teach to the test, period. However, in real life we do not: answer multiple choice questions, write in 5 paragraph essays, read short excerpts……..

In real life we write differently for different purposes, we read full-length selections, discuss/debate our ideas and those of others or those we read…….

The 5 paragraph essay has a place. For people who simply cannot write it provides a framework around which to organize a decent and readable essay. For college prep and honors students it can dehumanize the process by instilling an assemblyline approach to teaching writing. Or, you could compare it to writing to a formula. T he type of essay one writes needs to be in accordance with one’s purpose for writing.

I taught a 4 paragraph essay recently to a class. The topic organized very nicely around 4, not five, paragraphs.

At this point I tend to think that what is more important are the thinking skills that provide the content for the essay. If a student can think through a prompt logically, then he or she can very likely construct several paragraphs to communicate his or her reasoning, plus an intro. and a conclusion.

I think you put too much emphasis on that one statement.

Anitya, I understand concerns about teaching to the test when life itself is not multiple choice. But still, I think these tests do reflect to some degree what the kids should know, but in many cases don’t because the curriculum and teaching aren’t that well thought through.

Recently, my ds had to take standardized tests for high school entrance. I obtained practice tests from the testing service and they indeed were very tough. But I didn’t think they were unfair or that doing well would require teaching to the test. Nonetheless, I ended up teaching him to the test. Why? The math section was practically nonstop word problems and he had done very little in his school. They were, with a few exceptions, real life word problems, similar to ones I’ve had to solve myself time again. Why couldn’t his school have taught him this skill—I had to intensively teach him how to attack them over his Christmas break.

A four paragraph essay was required where he had to agree or disagree with a saying, citing examples to back up his position. Essentially this required an introduction, one paragraph on one example, one on another, and a conclusion. I had to teach him how to order the introduction, use topic sentences and write the conclusion. I don’t think it’s unfair to expect that an eighth grader has written this type of essay enough times so that he could be tested on it. Mine, however, wasn’t.

Reading comprehension was on the test and I did not have to do much there but warn him to skip any poem that showed up because I simply did not have the time to teach him about poetry. When I went to school we started learning about poetry in second grade, and it was reinforced each year, but it was still much less than my mother or father learned. Is it so unreasonable to ask the schools for children to have some passing familiarity with poems and their treasure of the English language? I think my ds studied one poem in his whole school career until he was assigned three last week.

As for vocabulary, I had to resort to teaching him test taking skills because he had so many gaps. This is a function of early language problems coupled with too much busy work homework to have time to actually immerse himself in books. But why couldn’t the school have taught him vocabulary based on roots that he could use to figure out words on his own instead of giving him a set of 20 unrelated words to learn each week and forget the next?

For me writing is personal—is it part of the work output of the place where I work, where quantitative skills also are required. You might be surprised how hard it is to find people who can write. I work with MBAs, lawyers, and PhDs who flounder on putting together a clear, coherent memo. They think if I know what they must have meant it’s good enough for me to pass on to my superiors, busy people who don’t have time to wade through a poorly written paper that is too long because the author does not know how to tighten up his writing. They make elementary grammar errors but think if the meaning is more or less clear it doesn’t matter. So not only am I teaching my kids, I’m teaching 40-somethings with advanced degrees why they should avoid dangling modifiers and have clear antecedents for pronouns, not to mention why a topic sentences in paragraphs are helpful for the reader.

I’ll never forget in Fall 1981 sitting in my first college English class at The University of Texas when the prof asked us each to write a 5 paragraph essay so he could see where we were with writing.

I had never of a 5 paragraph essay.

I graduated in the top 25% of my well-regarded large suburban high school and I had never heard of a 5 paragraph essay.

I remember sitting there with my head in my hands thinking, “Oh my God, I have not been prepared for college.” It was a horrible feeling. I did, however, graduate with a journalism degree but there were some very difficult times and my GPA was not that great.

So, learning the 5 paragraph essay may only be useful in that someone in your future may ask you to write one.

I mean I had never HEARD of a 5 paragraph essay!

We scarcely wrote in high school at all! It was reading literature from an anthology and grammar.

My 11th grade daughter is reading books I read in college English.

I surely have a difficult time understanding how low we have sunk when I compare this to my high school curriculum many years ago.

There have ALWAYS been freshman writing classes in college, since well before I started college. The nice thing about a freshman writing class is that all they teach is writing.

In high school we must teach all of this and more in our English classes. There quite literally is not enough time to cover all that is in the standards and cover it well.

I personally advocate a writing class in high school. but the admin. tells me they teach that in English.

My son went through the high stakes testing in FL last year. I am not a big proponent of it in general but one very positive thing that came out of it was that my son was actually taught to write. It was the five paragraph essay and no it didn’t solve all his writing issues (grammar and spelling are horrendous). What I saw was that a very structured approach to writing can help anyone, even an LD child. And some children, like my son, will only learn to write this way.

He passed the test—with a 4–3 is average.

It is a narrow definition of writing and won’t get you everywhere. But it is a start for a kid who couldn’t write at all.

Beth

Beth—You have pretty neatly made the point I was trying to make—“a very structured approach to writing can help anyone, even (or perhaps we should make that especially) an LD child.” So why isn’t writing taught this way? This is my frustration. Teachers view the 5 paragraph essay as stultifying and have the kids “journal” instead so they don’t really learn how to structure writing at all. As a result, they struggle to be successful in written expression above the instant messaging level.

I guess I’m a little surprised that more people here don’t support the notion of a structured approach to teaching writing and getting that down pat before moving onto less constricting styles. Perhaps writing is not seen as so valued a skill in today’s world as it used to be. On the other hand, the move to including writing on standardized tests like the SATs makes me think there are plenty of others out there who think the decline in kids’ basic writing skills has been detrimental. I would guess that colleges and employers, not elementary and high school teachers, were the ones pushing to have writing included in the tests. As one of those employers I am all for it.

If you are ready to proclaim a decline in basic writing skills, please document this.

I graduated from H.S. in 1970. There was VERY little writing ever done in school, even H.S. English and it was never TAUGHT. The colleges routinely placed most students in freshman composition classes, even decent four-year institutions that were somewhat competitive. This was the norm.

As we churned through the 70s, people started to become concerned about writing and so the teaching of writing skills was begun, perhaps for the first time, by the late 70s. However, it was journal writing, an emphasis on fluency. There was a program back in that era called Power Writing which approached writing more or less through a formula. I agree most LD students need this kind of instruction.

I cannot think of when in our history writing was explicitely taught, but in the last generation. Our English classes covered literature and descriptive grammar, shredding other people’s sentences, not writing your own.

If you can find the evidence that we have gone downhill in TEACHING writing, please share this. Otherwise. please be careful with over generalization. [/b]

Here in the great state of Texas we have writing as part of the standardized tests. The first one is on 4th grade. They do emphasize writing now.

I think journaling is a cop-out though. When my son was in public school they had journals and journaling time (20-30 minutes/day) and each year at the end of the year my son came home with a totally blank journal. He never wrote a word and no one noticed. He’s not in public school anymore.

Anitya,
I graduated from high school in the early seventies. In our English class we had a three to five page composition due every week. We were taught about forming a central idea and thesis sentence that supported it in the introduction. Usually they were three ideas supporting the central idea. We wrote a paragraph on each one and then a conclusion. This is the classic 5 paragraph essay, although it was never called that. When I got to college, we were given a writing test. You could pass out of the English requirement based on the test. (I did even though I skipped my senior year of high school.) If you didn’t you had to take either a freshman composition class (credit given) or take remedial writing (no credit given—lots of engineers in the class).

Prior to high school, back in fourth grade, we had to write a story every week. Later on we did reports, usually on history subjects—I don’t remember how we were taught to do them. We continued doing reference reports for history through middle school, but English there was weak. We moved to a different area for high school and I remember someone in the administration commenting that my sisters and I had been well-prepared at our old school except for the English writing.

Perhaps my experience was unusual. But I still don’t get when kids are supposed to learn to write if the middle school shirks it and the high school English teachers find it boring. I don’t think it’s fair to think only kids who make it to college need to receive instruction in writing. As an employer I can tell you it’s way more difficult to teach someone writing post-college than it is to teach, for example, quantitative analytical skills.

You were fortunate. My college exempted students from composition (a credit class) based on SAT scores, but there was no writing component. Bear in mind that the article that inflamed you was written by a regular education teacher who does NOT teach sped. students. I do advocate some different strategies from the first grade for lower functioning and sped. students.

Anitya — yes, writing was taught, and taught well, for a long time before you were in school. In fact you were in the “modern” program that replaced the more classical program that I had. I graduated from high school in 1968, but most of my education was in the last hold-outs of the old-fashioned standards of the 1940’s and 50’s.

We were taught writing from the ground up. In Grades 3 and 4 we were taught to write paragraphs. I don’t remember the details, but we had to write a paragraph describing something, or tell what we did on vacation, etc. In Grade 4 we started to have essay exams. In Grade 4 we had an essay exam in geography and one in reading, and problem-solving tests in math, as well as a short written test in French. In Grade 5 all of the above plus history. By Grade 6 we had tests which I can remember in more detail that required fairly long essays; one question from Grade 6 which I remember well (because I made a silly mistake in planning my answer and got tangled in the world’s longest sentence) asked “Name the two companies that explored Canada’s North, describe where and how they explored, and compare and contrast them.” These questions required answers of at least a page, under testing conditions of limited time and no rewrites. We had regular long written assignments that were corrected and discussed in class, in reading and history and geography, as well as grammar lessons in both English and French. By Grade 8 we also had Latin grammar.
And no, this was in ordinary public schools in lower-middle-class neighbourhoods, with thirty-five to forty kids in a class, and zero budget - not even enough for school gyms or libraries, and our textbooks had to last for twelve to twenty years. It’s amazing what you can do with a planned and organized curriculum, steady development over time, and hard work.

The funny thing about this is that I have never heard of the “five-paragraph essay” before this post. It seems to be somebody’s way of structuring a writing plan — probably a good start, but the rigidity of the format sounds a little limiting. We were taught first to write one paragraph, and then to divide our work into several paragraphs *as needed by the material* as we got longer. Of course, we were also taught very very formal grammar in three different languages, and I never saw sentence diagramming until I was an adult — we didn’t use it and it really is not necessary, just one person’s way of trying to visualize the process.

Anyway, I find myself in an odd position on this issue. Yes I am in favour of teaching writing, and of teaching it well. But the “five-paragraph essay” does not seem to me to be the real issue; rather than being too much and too formal, it strikes me as too little, too late. Students should be learning to write from the first time they take up a pen in primary school. Journal writing is not teaching writing, it is a time-filler and a way of the rich (i.e those who already can write) getting richer (getting even more practice and rewards) while the poor non-writers get poorer. If students learn to write as a gradual process, a little longer and more complex and organized every year, then there will be no need for a bandaid quick, let’s find a recipe to fake teaching writing in a hurry, in junior high or high school.

I was taught writing, too, both in elementary school (but Catholic school) and junior high and high school — but I suspect it was taught to Smart Students, not regular ones. My Researching and Writing the Term Paper was definitely an elective and there were other “english” classes that didn’t have much writing at all.
I rather suspect, based on things I’ve heard from older folks, that writing was taught a whole lot more in previous generations.
This would probably cause major infarctions among many the current high school English teacher, and it is purely anecdotal, but just about everybody I know who is comfortable with the writing process had at least one English teacher who seemed to be rigid in his/her demands and taught a “five paragraph essay” or insisted that every main idea had three supporting point, or made them write parallel outlines… seems when you are forced into a structure for a while, when you then don’t have to stick to it, you can write about anything.

I know that my experiences in Grades 1 to 6 were the norm, since we were in small schools with only one or two classes to a grade and our schools were incredibly underfunded so anything extra was out of the question. (Bake sales to buy one encyclopedia for the whole school to use …)

And that norm taught twice as much as the present standard — writing essays, math problem-solving, mastering fractions by Grade 6 and *everyone* did pre-algebra and basic algebra in Grades 7 and 8, reading music, French speaking and grammar, history and geography …

I had an art history professor who was speaking out against the “Do your own thing” and “relevance” arguments of the time in the late sixties. He made the point that all creative art (and this includes writing) is an experiment in playing with limitations — limitations of your medium, of your culture, of your subject matter, of your patrons, and so on. Take away the limitations and you have nothing to frame your work. One interesting instance of this is in the fields of science fiction and fantasy; Isaac Asimov pointed out that many outsiders think these are easy because you just make up anything — but the opposite is the case: you have to imagine a possible society and a culture and make your characters deal with its limitations, and their own, in a believable manner.

Famous quote: In art, as in life, the difficulty consists of drawing a line somewhere.

In my case, we had the dragon lady, Mrs. Seidel, in Grade 10. She taught the curriculum, which included the poetry of Wordsworth and Eliot and others and poetic diction (Quick, what’s a dactyl? Hexameter?); Dickens and Shakespeare and symbolism; and essays and more essays. She wouldn’t accept anything that was careless; before her class I was a fairly good speller and used pretty good grammar, and after it I was a professional proofreader. She was scathing in her criticism of anything that wasn’t your best. She had character and interests outside of school and a temper — she would never be hired in most high schols today, more’s the pity. I am very grateful to have had such good teaching. I’ve also mentioned Mrs. Ross In Grade 3 who taught a large class to write copperplate with dip pens and inkwells, taught French grammar and math and spelling and choral singing and reading music — teaching was her job and she was going to do it well; I am very grateful to her too.
But neither of them nor any of our other teachers felt it necessary to mention the “five-paragraph essay”. Yes we wrote essays, yes we had to justify our statements with references, yes we had to have a beginning and middle and end. But we were not given a pre-set outline — we were supposed to have learned (and over 90% of us did) how to set up an appropriate outline of our own in earlier stages, so forcing five paragraphs or a particular form of outlining would have been a waste of time. Mrs. Seidel in particular would have found such a system beneath her and would have said so.

I didn’t mean to suggest that I am attached to the 5 paragraph essay (a term I also only learned about it recently). I’m not. What I would like to see though is very structured writing instruction beginning about the second or third grade that builds up incrementally from sentence to paragraph to multiparagraphs to essay. I totally agree that writing is an experiment with playing with limitations—thus my distaste for my dc’s teachers who have substituted free form journaling for actual writing instruction.

I do believe, however, that if middle school and high school teachers are faced with a flock of kids who have not had the benefits of an earlier incremental structured approach to writing it is incumbent upon them to teach the fundamentals. It is not okay in this situation to assign kids, as my ds’s seventh grade teacher has done, writing a persuasive essay, for example. This is teaching by assignment, not teaching by instruction.

This is what set me off about that article. The teacher in question appeared to have disdain for teaching any structured approach to writing although, by his own admission, even his honor students found the writing sample on the Virginia SOLs a struggle. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that honors English students should breeze through whatever is required on an SOL. Only he himself did well on this test (he submitted an essay under a psuedonym), no doubt because he, unlike his students, had had the benefit of at some point in his past, a teacher(s) who had patiently taught a way to structure writing. Such instruction is so invaluable—even if the child will never write anything more than an email after he leaves school, learning to structure writing will help him to structure his thoughts, a skill that is essential to problem solving in general.

BTW I have been reading one of Mel Levine’s books in which he makes the point several times that writing is one of the most complex of student tasks because it requires bringing together simulataneously so many different skills. Kids that are not obviously LD in lower grades often fall apart when required to write in the higher grades. All the more reason to ensure that all kids get the sort of thorough grounding in writing in the earlier grades like Victoria and—to some extent—I did. Virtually all the schools seems to have fallen down on writing, including, in my area, most of the exclusive private schools that charge a $20,000 tuition.

Victoria, I graduated from H.S. in 1970. We are the same generation, same era, essentially same educational thinking. I was never TAUGHT writing until college. I DID some writing, was never taught.

There is a huge difference between assigning writing: essays, reports, stories and TEACHING the writing process. I recall primarily being assigned and having a mother at home who helped me with the nuts and bolts of getting my thoughts into words, beginning with a hook, etc. I do not recall any teaching of this process, just the assignments being given. That is not teaching writing, it is assigning writing.

I believe if we examine our experience we will find that there was more assigning than teaching. Terms like “thesis” I have learned since becoming a teacher in the 1980s and 1990s, into this century. I accomplished those things well because my mother taught me well. She sat next to me and was my sounding board while I composed. We discussed the ideas and she suggested approaches.

Many poor writers need a structure such as we have been discussing, without it they say little; often they list. They need to learn to articulate a thesis, to think about how to support and prove their thesis and to include commentary to clarify their thinking. Without a structure that forces them, many LD students won’t ever get to this point.

Anitya — yes we’re the same generation in calendar years, but my schools were holding the fort of a much more classic program, refusing to change for well over a decade until the government legislated them out of it.
We did indeed have actual lessons in writing — lessons in how to construct sentences, in how to use modifiers, in how to design a paragraph around topic and examples, in making a precis (very short summary of given fixed very short length — a hard job!), in writing essays of various kinds, and so on. We also had a lot of correction of our writing, which is the form of individual instruction that really helps you improve, painful as it may be.

I wince when I hear the phrase “the writing process”. My poor daughter had classes labelled “the writing process”; she went to schools that were determined to teach kids to write creatively by forcing everybody to follow the same lockstep system. She could already write very well and learned only to hate English classes; the test scores of the school system as a whole, far below US and even state average (PG County MD, late 90’s), did not exactly encourage us to change our minds. The system of two or three outlines and three rewrites they enforced drove her to tears or anger — this is the verbal bright dysgraphic kid, who learned to write but had to work hard at it. I found it hilarious when the whole class wrote the essay based on exactly the outline the teacher made up on an overhead (this was supposedly an honours Grade 10 class, not kids who should need extra help.)
When I was tutoring Grade 1 kids in this same system, the poor little guys were given “writing prompts” that were hilariously inappropriate. These prompts were made up by, and required by, the state education bureaucracy. One I was asked, by the teacher, to help with was “What would you pack for a trip to Mexico?” Grade 1??? The little barely six-year-old kid (a) didn’t even know the name of the state he lived in, much less what Mexico is or where (b) had never left home on an overnight trip (c) could just barely form the letters of the alphabet (d) could just barely spell the first hundred words of vocabulary — Mexico? suitcase? would? And this was supposed to be a lesson teaching “the writing process.” I was not impressed, and luckily neither was the excellent teacher who did the minimum possible of this kind of junk — but other classes suffered with people who took it seriously.
So why are little kids in Grade 1 asked to write creatively about any topic under the sun off the top of their heads, and honours senior high students aren’t expected to even plan their own essays? Isn’t this totally backwards? This is one of my points about the “whole language” people doing things that could be worthwhile but at mixed-up times and places.
As in many other areas, it is a good thing to look beyond the cover and the advertising and see what is actually involved in a program that is intended to teach writing.

[quote=”Mariedc”]Sara,

The five paragraph essay forms the basis of almost all writing kids will be called upon to do in college.

Having taught at the college level for many years and being college educated myself, I disagree with that. In fact, I think the 5 paragraph essay is a disservice to students of the social sciences which is my background. I never wrote another 5 paragrah essay after high school and in fact all of my college writing and graduate school as well asked writing of me that had nothing to do with the 5 paragraph essay.

Pargraph writing I would agree is the basis of expository writing but the 5 paragraph essay was invented by a Harvard professor in the late 1800s because he simply didn’t want to read more than 5 paragraphs.

I don’t have a problem as a teacher with the 5 paragraph as being ‘uncreative’ - I see it as unhelpful and deceiving of what students have to do in college. Now perhaps for English majors it’s different but for any student of the social sciences, the 5 paragraph essay serves no good purpose.

It’s a good discussion. Whether today’s students vs. yesterday’s student is instructed in writing may not be the point. I think the structure of writing curriculum is outdated and needs to be revised. Since the late 1800s, we instruct writing often around literature. I don’t think it serves well and too many writing tasks assigned these days are obsolete (including the 5 paragraph essay) While I agree that the popular ‘journaling’ does not teach sound writing skills, I think writing curriculum is a ‘mish-mash’ of assignments. The persuasive essay, the compare and contrast essay - who writes those kind of essays after high school? Writing curriculum is subject to many fads and fashions not all of which serve the development of good writing. And nowhere do we teach the writing of a good memo.

And in my childhood, business was done in writing as travelling was time consuming and expensive. These days much business communication is done in person and over the phone.

There are also particular obstacles to writing instruction today as I see it other than outdated curriculum. One is that no school has computers available to every student every period. In the old days, we sat at our desks and wrote in school. I would not expect any modern class to be able to do this. They’d understandably want their keyboards. And even with them, many would be unable to sit focused and just write through a class period. Writing assignments have to go home as I see it and not every student has the ability to do homework at home.

My students have always asked - show us how to be good writers but don’t make us write. If I knew how to do that, I’d be rich. Writing can be a tedious task but there’s not way to learn how to do it but to buckle down and write and buckling down comes home to modern kids who live in a fast-paced world of instant gratification where verbal skills and oral presentations have become easily as important as writing skills.

Sara — back in the dark ages in the classic curriculum, we did almost all of our writing at home. This was true from Grade 5 or 6 upwards.The only exception was exams, where it was understood that you were writing under pressure and minor errors were passed with that in mind. Yes we wrote in longhand, in pen; I didn’t learn to type until my twenties. Very very few people had home typewriters. But the assumption was that if you were going to put your name to something and hand it in, you were going to take some time over it, think about it, plan it, edit it, etc.
Unlike the modern “writing process” that drove my daughter nuts, the type of outlining and editing and rewriting was left up to the writer, at least after elementary school. If you did insufficient editing, Mrs. Seidel would toss the essay back on your desk with a pungent comment and tell you to do it right before handing it in again. She was also very positive if you wrote something good and original. It is this kind of feedback that makes you learn to do a better job, in any field. It is important as well to have the responsibility of doing your own work and the respect given that you are capable of planning and working on your own — of course, in the logical order of more support in the beginning and more responsibility with maturity, not the reverse order that keeps showing up.

When I entered Grade 12, we had moved to a different area with a more “modern” system. The first time the English teacher told us to produce an essay on the spot in class I was in shock. How did I know what I wanted to write or how I wanted to organize it? I hadn’t had any time to think it over! Luckily when I explained this block to the teacher she let me finish it over lunch hour. Later I learned to treat the situation as a test and come up with off-the-cuff essays, but they were not the very best work I could produce. Then in university of course we went back to having to hand things in on our own, and I found I could get A’s in most arts classes simply because I knew how to write and my classmates didn’t.

To go back to the original thesis that I am trying to illustrate, writing has been taught for a very long time, since the invention of literature a few thousand years ago. As in most fields, the way to learn to write is to do it — not just at random in a journal, but as in any other skill, under the supervision, guidance, and correction of a knowledgeable instructor.
As I keep saying in the reading field, learning any skill worth doing requires those three dirty little four-letter words, hard work and time.
As the old — two-thousand-year-old — saying goes, there is no royal road.

I’m just getting back from a big conference of Developm,ental Educators — lots of talk about how to get students who haven’t learned to read, write or do math in high school to learn to do it in college.
Just one tidbit while I check the rest of the email backlog… one speaker had a Harvard sidebar… the *most* common answer to the question fo students “what do you want to be able to do better when you graduate” was wanting to write better.
(And, by the way, humanities students *did* tend to graduate with better writing, and Math/Sci majors did NOT. Very interesting…)