Truthful Tuesday - Five-Paragraph Essays
A little while ago, Trey posted his disbelief that teachers still make kids write five-paragraph essays. And while I can understand his frustration that education hasn’t moved on since he (and I) were in school, as a high school English teacher, I am in a unique position to understand the merits of this practice. So, at the risk of sounding like “the man”, I’ll offer some thoughts on the five-paragraph essay.
By the time I get students in high school, most of them can manage the mechanics of writing (spelling, grammar, and punctuation), so the five-paragraph essay doesn’t focus on these. Instead, the single biggest issue these students have is the inability to focus their thoughts in order to make a clearly supported point or sustain a logically sequential argument. And these two skills are rapidly disappearing in the ADD generation as evidenced by our plummeting Math and Science scores (two disciplines which rely most heavily on logic and sequential arguments).
Taught correctly, the five paragraph essay allows students time to brainstorm, organize, write, and revise a piece of work that they are simply incapable of generating in a single burst. When mastered, the writing process is something that these students can take with them their entire lives and scale up as needed. After all, the exact same process is used on a five-paragraph essay as is used in college on a twenty-page paper or Master’s Thesis or in the business world on a PowerPoint presentation (hell, I even used it in this blog post).
Unfortunately, this process is seen as old and antiquated because in a world of brave new teaching strategies, it is the one carryover from previous generations. However, it is still around because it works. And while it seems strict and rigid and everyone complains about it, most of the complaints are because it’s a difficult skill to master and kids (and I won’t even say kids “these days” because it was the same when I was in school) are trained to give easy answers and essays require sustained attention and thought and are a multi-step process. The best thing I can do is reward them for using the process by giving them credit for every step and show them that in the end the process works.
So while the kids (and parents) mumble and grumble about writing a five-paragraph essay, the simple fact is this: in order to teach kids about how to write CONTENT as opposed to mechanics and to help foster organized and sequential thought, nothing better has come along. And I doubt anything ever will.
(And by the way Trey, no hard feelings about your post. I hear this ALL the time!)
