10/9 blog

In “The Politics of the Paragraph,” Michelle Kenney highlights the structure of writing that is taught in schools and the problematic repercussions of formulas that students are taught. 5 paragraph essays are something I struggled with all throughout high school. In the beginning of the piece, Kenney talks about her student Erica, and I identified with her so much reading this. Not in the outside of the classroom problems so much, but the fact that I felt like such a crappy writer because I couldn’t fit all of my ideas into a 5-paragraph essay formula. I was told my ideas were too broad and I needed to narrow my ideas down. Less is more sometimes, blah blah blah. It gives me skills when I think about my high school English classes. You would think that these formulas would make it so much easier to write papers, but for me, and I’m sure several other students all over, it makes it so much harder. There’s a quote from Kenney’s piece that really stuck out to me – “Systems like these encourage students to produce shallow, fast-food versions of paragraphs that don’t allow much elbow room for creativity or critical thinking yet lend themselves to speed grading by a standardized test scorer or an overworked instructor only 50 essays into a stack of 160 on a Sunday night.” This really spoke to me on a student level and a future teacher level because as a student I feel this statement in my soul as the worst thing a school system could expect of a student. On a teacher level, I hesitate to say I understand the idea behind the grading part because in my opinion, if you’re a teacher, you should want to expand your students writing skills, not confine them to a formula to make your life easier on a Sunday night when you’re grading papers. One of the reasons why I decided to become a teacher was because I feel as though my English classes in high school were such a negative experience – I decided that I was going to make a small difference and give kids something better than what I had. The section where Kenney talked about the standardized writing test in order to graduate also spoke to me, because my high school required the same thing when we took the NECAP junior year. If you didn’t pass, you were allowed to retake it senior year with the juniors, but if you didn’t pass, you didn’t graduate. Kenney’s doubts about the PEAS formula lead to her writing her own models for students to read – and for what? All the teachers in her school were simply teaching to a test they knew would be difficult for their students. While I don’t question the fact that they obviously all cared enough to find a way to help students pass their standardized test, I question the method of creating another formula for students to follow. If all the students in one school are following one formula, and all the students at another are following a different one, how do you truly standardize writing? And should writing be standardized? I think that students should be held up to certain expectations, however, I can’t say I believe in the concept of a standardized test, never mind a writing one. It’s not really teaching anything other than how-to plug-in pieces of an equation to pass and move on. Writing isn’t math. While some of the students at Kenney’s school said that this new equation helped them, Kenney found their writing to me less meaningful which leads me to question – is writing even worth it if it’s not meaningful?