Having stepped away from teaching after so many years in the classroom, I’ve begun to reflect more fully on the beliefs that helped sustain me as a writing and literature teacher for so long—but also made it difficult to continue.
I remember all of my own children’s first efforts at putting words on the page in elementary school. They took real joy in those early school assignments, like those awesome acrostic poems—put the letters of your name down the left side of the page, now write in a word that starts with each one of those letters, and voila, you have a poem. These were not graded. Misspellings weren’t circled in red. They were fun, inventive. Students weren’t expected to have a “clearly discernible thesis statement” or to support their claims with “concise references to a text."
Soon, though, teachers start to distribute outline forms, blanks for your thesis statement, your first, second and third supporting details, a conclusion (that restates your thesis). No more crayons. No misspellings allowed. You’re working on lined paper now, keeping your words neatly within those rigid demarcations of space. Play time is over. It’s time to get serious, to write a real essay.
And, no surprise, this is the time when many children begin to hate writing and by extension reading, to feel as if putting words on a page is just another arduous task with too many rules.
I saw it regularly in my high school students, many who hadn’t faired well in middle school or 9th grade English and had developed a visceral fear of all things English. They knew the drill. They would try to do the reading, but get confused, bored, search for an online summary, knowing a quiz was likely—and then, gasp, they’d have to write a paper about it. And those papers would likely come back filled with red marks. What is meant by an arguable thesis? What is an independent clause? How can you splice a comma? I’ll never figure it out. I’m just not good at English, they’d conclude.
This shift from real joy at playing with language to trying somehow to write your way through the minefield of potential errors is too much to bear for many young writers. From pre-k to first, second, third grade, we give them freedom to make mistakes, and they thrive. Soon they are fixing their errors on their own. They hear the proper pronunciations of words. They sense the logical coordination of ideas—though so many of those early “mistakes” are remarkably poetic and memorable. I remember my eldest son not wanting to go to daycare. He was having too much fun playing in the puddles in our driveway. I tried to use logic on him. “There will be rain and puddles at daycare too!” His reply, “I want to play in papa’s rain.” I didn’t scold him for improper use of a possessive. Instead I was inspired to write an article for American Baby called “Moonstruck,” about the poetry of early language.
By the time students got to me in 10th, 11th, or 12th grade, many of them, sadly, perhaps most of them, were already terrified of written expression. Whatever it was that had robbed them of their love of language-play made them so afraid that some of them could barely begin to write at all.
I’m not blaming my fellow teachers for any of this. I have known and learned so much from so many dynamic teachers intent on helping their students become better writers, many of them far more willing than I to sacrifice the endless hours it takes to help them. More to blame is the central paradigm of how educational institutions are designed. The need to sort kids according to grades/“abilities,” recommend them for honors/AP courses, the ever-growing pressure to increase class size, the need to issue a transcript containing their GPAs…all run fundamentally counter to what we should be doing and many of us try to do to teach kids how to write. The apparatus of school itself, as it is largely conceived in the United States, too often puts a stranglehold on teachers despite their best efforts, schools all too often clinging to educational norms established in the late 19th century.
And I faced another problem. When I told them my beliefs about “thesis statements” they were often left utterly dumbfounded. “A thesis is defined as a ‘statement of meaning’, so why call it a ‘thesis statement’? Isn’t that redundant?” I’d ask them. “Why might a teacher insist on that term and insist on having you place it in your first paragraph? Should essays have a thesis, a central idea that you are working to prove or advance, by all means, yes. Might teachers call it a thesis statement or ‘a statement of meaning statement’ because they feel a need to over-emphasize the ‘statement’ part of the definition? It seems so. Might they want a super-clear statement early in the essay so they know where to look for it, so they can more easily assess its merits and procure the grade the school requires of them?” I’d ask them, their eyes growing wider, their understanding of what English teachers and schools want unraveling.
Take a look at any great essay, say George Orwell’s classic, “Shooting an Elephant.” Many of you have probably read it. I challenge you to find any clear statement of meaning, anything that even hints of a “thesis statement.” Yet, the essay has a complex, grounding thesis to be sure. Some students (and former colleagues) (and perhaps some of my readers) even think I’m just wrong, that the five paragraph essay, the emphasis on conceiving a strong “thesis statement,” pre-planning your essay, etc., helps young writers to establish an essay with at least some semblance of form and logic and cohesion. But I’d rather read an essay void of convincing logic and wildly incoherent in some ways, if I sense something authentic coming from the writer, some genuine engagement, a rhythmic line, a human voice coming through—as opposed to the dead voices we seem to champion: “In this essay I will discuss the deeper meaning of ‘Shooting an Elephant’….”
An argument I hear a lot is that you can’t just set kids loose like this, tell them to forego putting in a thesis statement, because they will get lost. But might it be good for them to get lost, to write a first draft of an essay with no discernible thesis and certainly no thesis statement? The writer Rick Bass uses the metaphor of getting lost and finding his way back home to describe the act of writing. I imagine if that metaphor were as common as the five paragraph essay structure, we might just have far more dynamic writing coming from our students.
A thesis statement is a strange thing for another reason. You’re asking students to come up with a complex central claim before they’ve written anything. This implies that writing is not a means to an end, a way toward discovery, but only a vessel for notating preconceived discoveries. I’m certain when Orwell wrote, “In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people,” that remarkable first sentence of “Shooting and Elephant,” he hadn’t a clue where he was going and only knew that his experience of having to kill an elephant, as a representative of the British empire in southeast Asia, was filled with all manner of symbolic and emotional significance worth exploring. And notice, too, how that first sentence pulls us in, urges us to read on, lets us hear a real, human voice right out of the blocks. Aren’t these things more important than stating a thesis immediately?
Far too many students come into English classes thinking a formula needs to be followed to write a competent essay, that writing itself is not a tool for discovery, and when they come up with a “thesis statement” that is overly simple and not argumentative enough—“In this essay I will argue that Orwell feels bad about being British in ‘Shooting and Elephant’”—and they are graded down for it (“your thesis statement is more observational than argumentative” 7/10 pts), they become ever more convinced they are poor thinkers and bad writers, even though they haven’t really been allowed to let writing do its magic, take them somewhere unexpected, pull them along toward more complicated, more nuanced ideas.
I have no easy solutions here, and in my 30-plus years of teaching, I found no silver bullets. I surely left many students frustrated, trying to figure out what I “wanted” as I urged them to let their ideas flow, to write their way toward clarity, to make drawings, charts, mind maps, write first drafts on brown paper bags, to surprise themselves, to learn something as you’re writing, not before you’ve written, to be daring, to take risks…. I’m ever hopeful, though, that I did help some young writers rediscover the lost joy of playing with words and writing your way toward what you want to say.
I think it’s essential to sustain those fun, playful, low-stake/no-stake exercises and assignments we are more than willing to give to young children on into adulthood and beyond (see my “Word Doodles” post in the archives). I think it’s even possible to not teach the traditional 5 paragraph essay at all (heretic!), focusing instead on other dynamics critical to the writing process, especially the process of drafting; requiring students to start out with meandering, probing and not clearly centered rough drafts may well serve students better than asking them to come up with a dynamic thesis statement before they’ve written one word.
We need to remind ourselves that we all learned the rules of spoken English without a handbook, without being graded down for every error. Our parents and elders laughed at our errors, found them charming and inventive and missed them when our spoken words became more normative, more like everyone else’s. My wife grew up in Mexico and spoke mostly Spanish with our children when they were very young, and I fondly remember the day my daughter asked me to “Saca me out!” when she wanted out of her high chair (saca from the reflexive Spanish verb sacarse meaning to take out). Her bilingual redundancy was her way of stressing her urgent desire to get out of that chair, to go play with her brother in the next room. And I applauded her creativity, her inventiveness at searching for a way to make her demand known as fully as possible. I also love that “saca me” even hints at the reflexive nature of the Spanish verb.
And as I write this and think back on my long teaching career, I realize I frequently felt something akin to my daughter’s urgency to get out of that chair, to break free of all the constraints—class size…curricular requirements…the need to issue grades—that all too often kept me from really implementing things I knew in my heart were necessary.
Perhaps the single-most convincing, supporting detail I could use in this reflection is to point to the undeniable reality that the vast majority of students leaving high school and entering college do not write well. And plenty of students leaving college still do not write well and harbor a negative attitude toward writing (and often reading) for their entire lives. Whatever it is we are doing, it isn’t working all that well. And is there a thesis statement guiding this post? Here you go: too often school curriculums move far too swiftly away from nurturing a playful, creative attitude toward written language. No, wait, that doesn’t say everything I’m trying to cover here. Why can’t I condense my thoughts down to single, concise statement?
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“Saca me out!”
Yes! My thoughts exactly and so well written. Sigh. But glad to read this on the morning of our first day back—encourages me to keep doing what I’m (not) doing when teaching writing.
Your observations on the frustrations inherent in the teaching of writing are spot on :) I shared many of the same frustrations when I taught Spanish, French and Italian over a thirty + length career. The loss of a sense of play in later years is the saddest of all things, the cause for a precipitous drop in self confidence and interest, most often manifested in high school. The contradictions inherent in teaching students to fit into preexisting “knowledge boxes” while expecting them to somehow find their own “voice” became a source of heartbreak for me as their teacher, tasked as I was with filling those boxes with information. I did all I could, within the demands of a rigid pathway to AP tracks and the like, to celebrate errors and spontaneity and to share in the humor and joy of discovery. For most, the sense of creative play that had been encouraged in the early years had, by high school, been beaten down and replaced by a sense of dread and fear of making punishable mistakes. Tragic, really.
When Ali, at around age five, referred to the state of the world as she saw it as a “doggy dog world “, it saddened me to tell her that the expression was actually “ dog eat dog”. She was quite horrified…To this day, I’m not sure that my correction did her any favors.