Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Failing and excellence
I’ve been trying to tweak Jake’s writing so that he can wow a high school English teacher. (Listening, Sis?) Maybe I’m maligning secondary education, but based on what I experienced at Berkeley, the bar isn’t merely set low for “writing excellence,” the bar is hidden by weeds.
Here is my contention: to get an A on a high school paper, the student need only (A) have a clear thesis statement in the first paragraph, (B) have clear topic sentences for each supporting paragraph, (C) support his thesis in a factual way in the body of the essay, (D) restate the thesis at the end, and (E) avoid egregious spelling and grammatical errors.
I suggested to Jake (and, for my troubles, he accused me of sounding like this summer’s latest Feel Good Inspirational Movie) that this isn’t good enough. If he is capable of excellence, he should strive for excellence.
What’s lacking in the “A paper” I’ve outlined above? The deficit lies in (D), the restatement of the thesis. I told Jake that most A students only manage to reword their thesis statement and bring nothing new to that last paragraph. Thus*,
Paragraph 1: In this paper, I will demonstrate my love for fried food.
Paragraph 2: I love all the common fried foods. I love French fries, onion rings, and Tater tots.
Paragraph 3: I also love fried meats. Sweet and sour pork? Bring it on! Fried shrimp? Can you say, “All you can eat”?
Paragraph 4: I even love uncommon fried foods such as fried smelt, fried zucchini, and battered-and-deep-fried Snickers Bars.
Paragraph 5: In conclusion, if it drips grease and clogs your arteries, I’ll eat it up like a bag of Lays Potato Chips.
See what I mean? The summary statement tells us nothing we haven’t already learned with the thesis statement in Paragraph 1.
I would argue that the best essayists give the reader an idea where the essay is going in Paragraph 1, edify the reader in the paragraphs that follow, and conclude with a summary which, while echoing the initial thesis statement, brings much more to the reader than the reader had at the outset. That’s what great essayists like Lewis Lapham, Kurt Vonnegut, or Andrei Codrescu manage to do (and they make it look easy, too). And that’s the goal to which my son should aspire.
Pull that bar up out of the weeds. Put it in the clouds. Set the kid up for failure, yeah! Better to fail at a lofty goal than succeed at a trivial one. And isn’t that the exact opposite of No Child Left Behind?
The brain is like a muscle. Yes, that’s my expert medical opinion. If you don’t use it, it atrophies; if you exercise it and push it to the limit, it grows stronger. Push it to the “fail” point and, next time around, the “fail” point will be that much higher.
On the other hand, maybe I’ll only succeed in giving the kid a nervous breakdown. Do people still get nervous breakdowns?
D.
* For the literalists, like my son: NO, I do not mean to imply that this “essay” would get an A. I’m trying to make a point, okay?
I contend you should write the conclusion first so reader ends on a high note. THEN take the great conclusion and write an adequate opening.
Bb. Just list menu items and assorted nonsense, since anything beyond the first sentence of the paragraph won’t get read anyway. Heck, the body of the paper won’t get read. Nor will the summary. Just make it look like you wrote a lot of stuff. Throw in an occasional big word, even if you don’t know what it means. The teacher won’t be paying attention anyway.
Oh, wait. That was History class. Nevermind.
Okay, you are right about what it takes to get an A on an essay in high school. If a student in my regular English class accomplishes A-D, I dance a jig because I don’t allow many take home essays (too easy for them to lift off the internet, and I refuse to waste time checking on them). However, in my Honors classes, an A is not easy to achieve; your description of what the best essayists do is what I look for in an essay from Honors students,(and this is in a timed, in-class essay). I tell my Honors students that I am looking for higher level thinking/support that goes above and beyond what was discussed in class. It is a level where I want to see support/ideas that makes me go “wow” when I am reading the essay.
So, I say, raise the bar, but first familiarize yourself with the expectations of the English Dept and the levels offered. What passes for “college prep” these days is laughable, and when you throw WHO is teaching into the mix, that makes a difference too.
NCLB? Anyone can teach to a test.
I learned how to write a good high school essay by having to write one over and over again in middle school and high school. After a while, you just get bored writing the same thing you wrote yesterday, and you come up with a better turn of phrase.
Two things that were helpful: Having discrete examples of different sentence structures, at least five, and being expected to NEVER use the same sentence structure on two consecutive sentences. (It got weird, yes, but it did force me to think about subject-verb sentence structure a lot. The other thing was being asked by my fifth and sixth grade teachers to write a paragraph a day . May be it was descriptive, maybe it was persuasive, but every day it had to get written. Every week we wrote a five paragraph essay on an assigned topic. That happened right through ninth grade.
In tenth grade I went to Andover, and we were expected to write a three page paper about twice a month, with various writing assignments in class as well.
When I got to college (Smith, the first time around) I heard freshmen groaning over a one page summary, and I just wanted to slap ’em. This made me not so very popular with my freshman roomies, but it made writing a conclusion a whole lot easier than it could have been.
I still find writing conclusions, difficult by the way. I agree with dcr, writing them first is often easier. Or, if you can find a phrase from each one of your supporting paragraphs above, sometimes you can weave those three or four phrases into a decent conclusion.
You know what’s funny, I just read your precis, and actually you DID add something new to your summary paragraph that was not in Paragraph 1. You did it without even realizing it.
Paragraph one says that you will talk about your love of fried foods. OK, fine.
By Paragraph five, you are saying “if it drips grease and clogs your arteries” then you’ll gobble it down quickly with no end in sight.
This is a different statement than paragraph 1.
From paragraph 1, I can go ahead and write an essay about my love for fried foods without really dwelling on the attributes of the foods themselves. I can focus on my emotions, my physical sensations when I bite into a greasy yet crispy thing, and I can even explore a bit of the guilt I experience knowing that this is not as good for me as broccoli rabe, which I also love, but not fried. If I end that essay with your paragraph 5, then teh essay is a touch tired. Same thing, restated again.
However, that’s not the essay you outlined. You talked about your love of fried foods by breaking down in detail which types (OK, all types) of fried foods you like: common, meaty, and uncommon. Good detail there, good range of foodstuffs to love. If you ended this essay with, “No matter what type of food it is, as long as it’s fried, then I’ll happily eat it,” then that would have been an exact restatement of your detailed paragraphs and thesis statement above.
However, you summarized a good essay. You have a general theme which can go in many directions. You have supporting details which develop the theme of your thoughts, and you conclude by bringing in a touch of something different as a well-rounded conclusion.
So did you mean to summarize a BAD essay (a la bad high school English)or a GOOD essay (a la Vonnegut)? Because now I’m confused. I think your standard dumb essay is not quite what you think it is.
Focus on the writing style. The details will come out with practice and self-critique. Teach him editing, not writing.
Carla, Dan, I see your points, but I’ve never been able to write the conclusion first. Often, the process itself brings me to the conclusion. The essay itself teaches me what I want to say. Then I’ll rewrite, knowing (now) what I need to demonstrate.
Sis, I’m glad to hear that you’re keeping high standards. The parents must hate you 🙂
Suisan, you’re making my head hurt 😉 And I do teach my son editing. What was I trying to do? I was trying to emulate the sort of paper which would get an A even at Berkeley. I’m not kidding. I know I’ve told this story before, but here goes: after I got an A on my first English class (a classical lit class), I complained to the prof because I really felt like I had performed poorly on the final (an essay). Was she ever incensed! I doubt she had ever had anyone complain to her about too good of a grade. But for me, it shattered the illusion that Berkeley was full of the best and the brightest. I found that if I wrote an essay like the one I satirized above, I could generally ace a written final. Very depressing.
And when I got into med school, I was REALLY depressed. What a step down from undergrad.
I don’t recall that story where you complained about the essay grade at Berkeley. Makes me wonder if they read the essays. That’s what I was trying to tell you about the teachers who are hired now. The work ethic is terrible. They grade holistically using rubrics that allow them to make very few comments (if any).
Surprisingly enough, I don’t get that many parents who dislike me, but every once in a while, a parent will tell me my grading is too harsh. See, this is why, back in grade school, kids should not be pushed on through, shouldn’t be coddled.
I think my head is hurting too. 😉
The private schools I went to, the ones that actually taught me to write (Smith was HOPELESS at teaching a well-crafted essay. Awful.) never graded our papers. We had copious comments, but no letter grades on daily written work, only on classroom participation, tests, and long papers.
The daily paragraphs were graded and handed back as a bunch every few days, so you’d get three or so at a time. (The teacher didn’t have to kill himself grading all these paragraphs every day to get them back by the next morning.) When you got a few back at a time though, the comments really registered: “Your characters often break out in cold sweats, it seems. Does no one sweat warmly?” I haven’t used the phrase since Miss Williams wrote that comment in fifth grade.
From talking to middle school and high school teachers in my public school district, I’ll say that all of them complain about teaching writing. It’s hard to do, it’s hard to grade, and it takes a long time to grade all those papers, so they end up assigning fewer papers. Personally, I think it’s a cop-out. The dedication isn’t there to do it well because someone in college (yeah right) will focus on the bright ones and teach them how to write “when they get up there”.
Apparently you and I are of a similar educational generation.
Your concept of essay construction is the same as mine.
They don’t teach that structure theory any more. I rewrote my son’s essay papers in the “thesis statement” format on three occassions. Three different teachers kicked them back, saying the format I used was an anachronism.
It’s like New Math. We’re dinosaurs.