Let
me begin by admitting that I am not a fan of “the 5 paragraph essay.” In fact, I might even call myself
evangelical in my pursuit to eradicate the pedagogy of “the 5 paragraph essay”
from teaching. I‘ve told my high school students that they have to unlearn
it to pass my class. Yet, I’m
about to start teaching a 7th grade unit delivering just such a
curriculum. Read on.
Fifteen
years ago, before I began teaching, I was lucky to be able to apprentice myself
to John Schmit (an Associate Professor at Augsburg College) as his Rhetoric
Assistant at the Carleton College Summer Writing Program. I remember and still use his
explanation to our shared students as to why perhaps they shouldn’t use a
thesis statement that previews their three main ideas. “It’s just a list,” he told the group.
Such a rhetorical construction doesn’t explain relationships among ideas,
doesn’t accurately reveal a writer’s thinking. It merely provides some blanks for students to fill in order
to complete the task of writing an essay.
Many
teachers (myself included) have justified teaching the 5 paragraph essay as
“academic writing” which gets students ready for college. However, Linda Flower, a Professor of
Rhetoric at Carnegie Mellon University and co-author
Reading-to-Write: Exploring a Cognitive and Social Process
, expands our notion of academic discourse in her
multilayered study of high school students transitioning to expectations for college
writing as freshmen. Flower
explains that academic discourse includes “
research, scholarship, and
theory” but also “encourages and values writing which presents new ideas,
hypotheses and mysteries, issues for negotiation, and thoughtful reflections.” Student writers ought to write to
transform or discover knowledge, and schema-driven tasks like writing a 5
paragraph essay change the writing purpose, prioritizing a perfection of form
over discovery of content.
Further,
the idea that college papers have to be written in a highly structured, formal way
is getting dusty. It’s a holdover
from New Critical movement of the mid-twentieth century that just doesn’t jibe
with the reality of our current semiotic landscape. Agency matters now.
And it motivates young writers.
When we secondary teachers tell students they can’t write “I wish,” “I
think,” and “I believe” we are “
tak[ing]
the inquisitiveness of a promising mind and devalu[ing] it” according to Rebecca
Feldbusch a Pennsylvania teacher and consultant with the National Writing
Project.
The
great revelation of these years in the middle of my teaching career has been a
paradigmatic shift from assessing students’ technical skills to assessing their
thinking. Assessing thinking can
be a messy, ambiguous business as is learning itself. (But it is possible to do efficiently in a classroom
setting.) I’ve learned to teach
writing as a series of risks and experiments that reveal ideas to student
writers who then arrange them into a composition whose form enhances its
rhetorical purpose. The process is
by far not as fluent as the sentence that I just wrote to describe it. Students get frustrated, they fail,
they start over and learn to be recursive thinkers and writers over time and at
different rates of progress.
That’s one reason why I wanted to come to junior high. I’ve long envied Nancie Atwell’s
classroom and the possibilities her workshop model offers for a thinking-based
curriculum.
In
junior high, I teach a course called Academy Prep, which was conceived as an
intervention for student writers who need additional support to be successful
in their grade level English class or in order to pass the Minnesota GRAD in
Composition. Twice already this
year, I’ve watched an over-reliance on the 5 paragraph schema sink a writer
mid-composition. Once, a young man
had written a lovely homage to his father as a rough draft. In revision, though, he tried to break
it into 3 body paragraphs governed by a thesis statement. The essay lost its controlling purpose,
and he couldn’t articulate what he learned from writing it—and therefore
couldn’t figure out how to conclude it.
Just recently, a new student labored over her graphic organizers to
write a practice essay for the GRAD.
Her tightly organized essay included such rhetorical clunkers as “First
of all” and “In conclusion” that only served to distract me from her ideas
instead of classifying them as she’d intended. Yet, the next day she brought me a personal essay she had
written for another class that was coherent, incredibly fluent and natural in content,
voice, and structure. To explain
the difference, she said that she had written it really fast and didn’t have
time to revise. In other words,
her internal editor didn’t have time to take over for her creative brain. I’m reminded of the motto of the
University of Minnesota’s Center for Writing: “Better writers, not better papers.”
But
now, we come to the moment where I sit reflecting. I spent most of my Saturday creating an activboard flipchart
to deliver the three-part thesis statement lesson to my 7th
graders. After all I’ve explained
and argued above, why would I do such a thing? Let’s enumerate.
1. As a former high school teacher, I have
to enter the junior high as an observer and a learner. Gifted, longtime 7th grade
teachers have handed me this curricular goal, which is built upon in subsequent
grades and across disciplines in the building.
2. My overwhelmed, culture shocked 7th graders—new
to junior high—are begging me daily for certainty. They are good kids who want to succeed and be seen as
successful in concrete ways. I need to strengthen their tolerance for ambiguity slowly and gently.
3. Schema development is critical to learning and, really, to
cognitive development. Building clear mental models for discipline specific, academic discourse is important for all students, but for
marginalized students in particular.
4. I know how to teach past this. The 5 paragraph essay schema represents scaffolded instruction—like
a child’s first swimming lesson in the safe hands of an adult. Eventually, after swimming with life
jackets and milk jugs, they’ll jump in alone to discover a whole new freedom of
movement. I just have to remove
the scaffolding intentionally, over time.
