Essay writing is a subject of much upset and it doesn’t need to be.  It is strictly because it has been taught incorrectly. 

We have had this incorrect way of teaching for so long, that by now everybody has agreed that essay writing is hell.  It is only “hell” because it is taught by the make-wrong method.

    If you get a kid to do something  he can’t do, and then you take a red pen and make his work a bloodbath , he’ll have a loss and hate it.  He won’t learn anything from it, but that he’s “no good”.   

This is like putting your kid in the car, turning the key, putting his foot on the gas, and saying, “Go kid!”.  And he wraps the car around a tree and his front teeth are gone and there is blood on the windshield and you tell him, “Well, that’s not how you do it.”

        He won’t want to drive again!  Nobody learns from the make-wrong method. 

The components parts of English are so many!  (composition, handwriting, spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure etc.)  You will have to have mastered all of these before you could  write anything.

What we are finding is, that essay writing in taught OUT OF SEQUENCE. 

There are two painful aspects to this:  

1. The kid is writing before he knows how to write, spell, or make sentences etc., so he has losses there.

2. He is putting forward  A VIEWPOINT.  This is very brave.  He is saying  “This is my point of view; I feel strongly about this”. And rather than getting an acknowledgment, he gets correction. 

This hurts.

Just imagine, you say “Martha, you and me belong together; will you marry me?” And she says, “You and I, Charley, it’s you and I, okay?”  No duplication of the intent.  Slap in the face.  Very painful.  

     The only way a student can survive this make-wrong method of teaching is to decide: “The teacher sucks”, and  “I must be stupid” followed by “I’m out of here”.  And that’s terrible, because once he has decides that – the ship is sunk.

Now the Brits did it right (long ago), they dedicated the first 6 years of school to grammar.  They called it a  grammar school.  You learned how to hold a pen, write beautiful cursive, how to spell, you learned vocabulary, punctuation, how to make compound/complex sentences, public speaking, prose and poetry etc…. You learned all those things in grammar school.   

And then you went to High School and to Debate Class.  You learned to express yourself , be persuasive and defend an opinion, to use logic and reason, how to deduce, analyze and extrapolate …. This is where you learned to think!

When the student had all that down and he could capitalize and insert commas in the right places, he was asked to write essays.

Then it was a cinch!   Frankly, it’s a twenty minute lesson.  You sort of explain the structure of it, and you remind him that all the tools  he needs for this, he already has.  NOW you can say, “Have at it kid!”

In our school we start writing essays about 6 months before finals.  None of my students are allergic to writing!  When they are ready, they sit down without any trepidations, and they write the most beautiful essays!  Then we tweak them a little bit, and a little bit more, lightly, without any make-wrong, and then they sit their SATs and get perfect scores.

It is that simple.  

Teaching by make-wrong is a losing proposition.  You probably remember it from when you were young, and how you hated it because you couldn’t win.  How you were being corrected on something you hadn’t learned yet, how you were asked to do something you couldn’t do. 

It’s mean!  It kills creative writers.  

Please don’t let anyone do that to your kids.

I hope this helps.

Joke