Essays

Again, Christensen really blew me away with another chapter in her book Teaching for Joy and Justice because I just find myself amazed by the awesome ways that she is able to really dive into teaching writing. Growing up, I always used the same formulaic writing that Christensen talks about with her students: Five paragraphs, intro, three bodies of evidence, and then the conclusion. Plain and simple and to the point with everything I ever wrote for school. I felt like if I tried to break out of this formula, I would get a failing grade because I wrote too much or I wasn’t being concise enough for my teachers. That’s probably why I never kept any of my papers from high school or ever felt like they had any meaning to them. It wasn’t until I hit college when I really started to understand that this “formula” had given me a base to work off of. I needed to get my reader’s attention with the intro, I needed to provide evidence even if it was more than just three paragraphs, and I needed to, as Christensen called it, “button” it all up with a conclusion. But breaking through that formula was a really rough transition for me, as I’m sure it would be for any student who grew up with it. There was one part of Christensen’s piece that really got to me when I thought of the the way that the five paragraph essay is a hindrance. Christensen wrote, “I write my way to understanding” (125). I couldn’t get this out of my head as I finished the piece because I was really thinking about the way the five-paragraph essay really stops understanding. It gives students time to choose three really important pieces of evidence, but it doesn’t give them the opportunity to dig that much deeper and really search through every nook and cranny of their writing and the writing of what they’re analyzing. So, I never believed the five-paragraph essay was necessarily a “bad thing.” I just think that the way teachers have relied on it in classes is the bad thing. It turned into an easy way of finding out which students were actually meeting all of the criteria of an “essay” and then just giving a grade based on that. So, I get teaching students a base, but I really think that by the time they get to high school and further out, its educators jobs to really push them even further than just five paragraphs. That’s the whole point of being an educator, right? To push students into higher learning. I was thinking of how Michelle Kenney’s school’s solution had been the PEAS essay with their students writing and I really think this was a good idea because it was a school-wide initiative to get students to write, but again, it wasn’t the final solution. I think adding in how Christensen pushed her students to analyze different forms of writing and break them down to understand what builds these different forms of essay writing.

Comments

  1. RubaMarch 26, 2018 at 11:01 AM

    I liked that Christensen mentioned she writes her way to understanding, I think we all do that on a subconscious level. I'm not sure if it was the first or second chapter where she asks her students to write deeper than they think by asking themselves questions that provide more depth and detail to their writing, I definitely think that they are writing their way to understanding as well. That being said, I don't think the five-paragraph structure allows a student to do that. It really boxes them up, but Michelle was clever enough to create PEAS to help students with this problem they feel like they can't escape.

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