With all of my research
so far, if you were to ask me about the five paragraph essay I would ramble on
and on about Montaigne, standardization, formulas, life, and risk. Now I bet
you are wondering, what do all of these things have in common and how do they
relate to the five paragraph essay? But I promise you, they are all important
to teach students writing, and more specifically, the writing of an argument.
From reading my blog so
far, you already know about Montaigne who is the father of what we know as the
essay, and you also know that standardization of education moved away from free
flowing ideas to more structured ideas of the education practice. The structuring
of anything will obviously always lead to formulaic thought and processes, which
are valuable for navigating anything in life. Cause and Effect is something
that can be applied to everything, but what about things that may not always fit
perfectly into our formulas? You cannot shove everything into a formula and
discover new things, sometimes you have to work out of that formula.
So no there are
Montaigne, standardizations, formulas, and life. But where is risk? Well, in
education we say that learning cannot be done unless students take risks and
not only try new things, but to fail and have to rethink. We say they need to
move out of the realm where they are safe, but need to be in a risk friendly environment.
But now that I study education deeply, I see this idea of risk that teachers
tell their students to involve themselves in, is often forgotten or not
practiced by educators.
To zoom in on the five
paragraph essay, many educators will agree that the five paragraph essay is not
a sample of great writing. Yet, in my education and many others, the education
on writing seems to stop at the five paragraph and students are expected to
develop these into more extensive and expressive pieces of writing. Why don’t
teachers work on teaching away from it. I personally think they are scared. Yes
I said it. Teachers are scared to teach away from the five structural
paragraphs and they hide behind the veil that standardized tests expect the
five paragraph essay. Teach to the test, an idea that drives me crazy, but that
is for another day.
I have come to see the
five paragraph essay as just a step to scaffolding the teaching of good writing.
A step, not the finale. One of the articles I read this past week said
something that I know I will never forget, and that was “Embrace discomfort if
you want to get better”. I think that we teach by using formulas because it is
easy to assess, and that is a place where comfort thrives for teachers, plus
formulas are procedural and easy to teach. But we tell students to take risks,
so why will teachers not take the risk on having to look at something that may
be hard to grade, or worse not even grade, just appreciate. Where would
Montaigne be if he didn’t take risks on writing different than others? So why
does it seem like most teachers are playing it safe and not working on
developing learning to benefit students outside of their standard box that is
school?
Nate: I can see that you're trying to capture my teacher heart with all of these rhetorical question you pose at the end of your post! YAY! I especially like the final question, and my response to it, as far as you're concerned is this: You're not going to be like "most teachers." You're going to be the exception.
ReplyDeleteWhat's wrong here, Nate, is the status quo. For far too long, it has been acceptable for teachers to not engage in reading and writing alongside their students or in any transparent way, where their craft, their struggles and their inner thoughts are made accessible to their students. For far too long, teachers have been the "assigners" not the writers. And, this has turned classrooms into factories where children produce masses of standardized essays while teachers grade those essays. I like that you're ending here with RISK. And, I agree that there's not nearly enough risk taking encouraged in school, at least not to compare with the amount of risk taking life requires of you once you get out of school!
So, writing and risk taking...I have a document to give you tonight in class that will illuminate this even more for you. It's a distillation of a research project where tons of college writing teachers read tons of essays and determined the top 4 characteristics of GOOD COLLEGE WRITING. Guess what one of them is?
Risk taking.
Risk taking is not part of the Common Core, btw.
So, where does that leave us, as teachers and as writers? We know we must take risks, but we also know school is more about conforming than about risk taking. So, where is the space for risk taking in schools? How do we make a space, an opening, for that as teachers? As novice teachers?
Maybe address these questions as you sail into your reflection on this process and what you're taking away from it. Thanks, Nate.