A few weeks ago, I ran across a comment in the Chronicle of Higher Education forums that compared the standard five-paragraph essay foisted upon students everywhere as the academic equivalent of a widget. That is, this kind of essay serves no other purpose than as a thought exercise that bears little relationship to the kinds of thinking and writing students will need to do in the real world.
While I would agree that the five-paragraph essay rarely leads to inspired writing--let alone reading--I think the comment misses a larger point about the nature of how students learn. So much of what we do in the classroom involves a measure of artificiality simply because, well, we’re in a classroom and we’re dealing with people who are not yet experts in the subject they’re studying. I’m a strong proponent of experiential learning and I try to help students make connections between the topics we talk about in class and life beyond the classroom. But I also use all kinds of classroom activities not because they mimic how students will use Spanish out in the world, but because they are helpful to students in gaining the skills and knowledge they will need out in the world. Just like medical students who start out with CPR dummies and cadavers, it’s OK to let beginning language students talk about a fictional trip to Spain before we ask them to undertake a complicated interpreting task. I’m fine with giving them activities that help them practice a specific vocabulary set or work on their verb conjugations, as long as they’re also learning how to convey relevant information despite limited language skills or to organize their thoughts in a meaningful way.
Which brings me back to the dreaded five-paragraph essay. Depending upon the kind of class I’m teaching, I’ve had students do all kinds of writing, from movie reviews to autobiographical essays. But I’ve also found the five-paragraph essay to be helpful in teaching students how to organize their thoughts around a central topic and then to marshall evidence that supports their interpretation of that topic. The ability to advance an idea and give valid reasons for supporting it is a really valuable skill, and it’s one that in very practical terms can help students convince employers to hire them or persuade future coworkers to join them in a project. And it’s a skill that carries over from writing into other realms, including the ability to evaluate the arguments of others, rather than accepting a proposition at face value.
I don’t doubt that there are other, and perhaps better, ways of teaching these skills, but I’m willing to cop to a certain amount of artificiality in the classroom because our job as teachers is to provide scaffolding that lets students try and fail and do better the next time. We give them tasks they can learn from until they’ve acquired enough skills and knowledge to do it on their own.
I don’t doubt that there are other, and perhaps better, ways of teaching these skills, but I’m willing to cop to a certain amount of artificiality in the classroom because our job as teachers is to provide scaffolding that lets students try and fail and do better the next time. We give them tasks they can learn from until they’ve acquired enough skills and knowledge to do it on their own.
Now I just need to remember all this when the next round of essays is due and I'm cursing the idiot who assigned so much freaking writing.
