4 ms·
As an author, I agree with what you are saying 100%. But I'm not sure that you are disagreeing with the OP. His point--as I understand it--is that you don't get
by a4isms 4y ago
As an author, I agree with what you are saying 100%. But I'm not sure that you are disagreeing with the OP. His point--as I understand it--is that you don't get better marks for writing an essay about Jazz that is clear, complete enough not to have gaps, and deep enough to display comprehension versus writing something that is digestible and flows.
In other words, you are being graded on the superficial form of the essay, not the depth and completeness of your thinking. You may have chosen to close the gaps and dig beneath the surface, buta s he says, the system strongly discourages teachers from grading you on your thinking.
Unless the essay was in a music course, how could a teacher know enough about the subject matter to grade you well, except by happy accident that they are also a Jazz afficionado? If an essay asks every student to write about their favourite hobby, which teacher can grade all the essays at that level?
I agree that one of the great values of writing is to force you to think a thing through, but my read of TFA is that unless you are holding yourself to that standard, you need a reader who will hold you to that standard, and a high school teacher is statistically unlikely to be that reader. And therefore, assigning essays in high school for the most part does not help students.
Those students who hold themselves to a higher standard than trying to efficiently acquire high marks will benefit, but the rest will not.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- klodolph 4y agoI made no indication I was disagreeing with OP. I would like to reply to your points and elaborate. I think your standards for high school writing are too high. "Clear, complete" sounds more like graduate-level work. Try reading papers from an undergraduate writing class sometime--the basic expectation is that students present a clear thesis with arguments that support it. The thesis itself can be wrong, reflect a facile understanding of the topic, have well-known rebuttals, etc. High-school writing is graded superficially for good and bad reasons. Let's get bad reasons out of the way first--teachers are overworked and underpaid, and don't have enough time to do a better job because they are busy with administrative bullshit or standardized tests. There are good reasons--superficial problems often reflect a lack of understanding for how ideas connect to one another. The correct use of paragraphs means understanding whether sentences express related ideas. If you can't tell if two ideas are related, you can't make paragraphs. Coordinating conjuctions like "and" or "but" have the same grammatical function but express different relationships between the clauses. Students use the wrong one, and it's often because they haven't thought about whether two ideas contrast with each other. Spot the "superficial" problems and you find markers for problems with the underlying ideas. If you don't assign essays to high school students, you're lowering the bar across the board, and I think we would end up with a crisis in graduate schools. High school is not just a fact / skill dump for various bits of subject matter like history and mathematics or whatever you want to include in the curriculum. It's also a place where people develop some of their critical thinking skills. Writing bad essays is a step along that path.