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"when I were a lad"... we used to have lines given to us as a punishment. Cue Bart Simpson writing on a blackboard, but for us it was "200 lines saying I am not

"when I were a lad"... we used to have lines given to us as a punishment. Cue Bart Simpson writing on a blackboard, but for us it was "200 lines saying I am not allowed to shitpost on HN" or whatever. If you could program a computer to print the lines for you, then 2 pages of dot-matrix printer output was accepted. I even had a teacher give me 2000 lines - a monstrous punishment by hand - because they knew I could code. They just didn't realise it would cost me an extra 5p in paper and nothing else. Teaching has moved on, and lines are no longer a thing. I hope teaching moves on from essays, because they're about the same level of educational achievement. Essay-writing is no longer a skill that anyone values outside academia, because we moved on. Academia should move on.

hot_gril 4y ago
Real work values the ability to write clear proposals and designs, which isn't far from an essay. Even in tech jobs. Sometimes I'm given a doc that takes so long to understand that it'd be better to just ask the author. There needs to be some way to teach writing skills, whether it's essays or something else. My real gripe with English class is that probably 95% of my assignments have been about fictional work where I'm supposed to describe a character's emotions or explain what the author meant by something. And seemingly the most boring books possible. It was useless and repetitive.
dehrmann 4y ago
> Essay-writing is no longer a skill that anyone values outside academia, because we moved on. Downvote because essay writing is essentially researching a topic, forming an opinion, and communicating that opinion. This is applicable in almost every knowledge job.
- marcus_holmes 4y ago
  Disagree. When I was writing essays for my MBA, I formed the opinion, searched for journal articles whose extracts agreed with my opinion, and cited them. I don't think I read a single article or researched a single topic. Essay-writing is about jumping through hoops; working out what the lecturer expects to see and then giving it to them. Admittedly that is also a skill required in every knowledge job (replace "lecturer" with "boss"), but I think there are better ways to teach this.

hot_gril 4y ago

Real work values the ability to write clear proposals and designs, which isn't far from an essay. Even in tech jobs. Sometimes I'm given a doc that takes so long to understand that it'd be better to just ask the author. There needs to be some way to teach writing skills, whether it's essays or something else. My real gripe with English class is that probably 95% of my assignments have been about fictional work where I'm supposed to describe a character's emotions or explain what the author meant by something. And seemingly the most boring books possible. It was useless and repetitive.

dehrmann 4y ago

> Essay-writing is no longer a skill that anyone values outside academia, because we moved on. Downvote because essay writing is essentially researching a topic, forming an opinion, and communicating that opinion. This is applicable in almost every knowledge job.

marcus_holmes 4y ago
Disagree. When I was writing essays for my MBA, I formed the opinion, searched for journal articles whose extracts agreed with my opinion, and cited them. I don't think I read a single article or researched a single topic. Essay-writing is about jumping through hoops; working out what the lecturer expects to see and then giving it to them. Admittedly that is also a skill required in every knowledge job (replace "lecturer" with "boss"), but I think there are better ways to teach this.