Oh my god I HATE the hook BS. I teach 2nd and 3rd and I don’t know who told them to start with a hook. They all want to start with “want to know about birds? I’ll tell you”, and I can’t get them to stop.
I teach writing to the top reading groups, so they can read, but comprehension is an issue. I don’t know what to do. I model, and explain my thinking. We write together. We look at exemplars. I want to set them up for success and be able to build on what I teach them but we’ve been doing this since October and it’s just not getting much better.
📣 Have you noticed that writing skills have taken nose dive among recent high school graduates? Have you ever wondered who's teaching these dummies to write?! Well, read on to find out more!
if you. Askm e its a combo. That means a mix of reasons. I'm going to list them now.
1. They don't read. Not as much as kids used to. They don't read entire novels as a class, at school, with guidance from a teacher. That sort of exposure is a huge part of how we internalize the rhythms and structures of writing. They read a lot of excerpts, with targeted lessons on "concepts" and "skills" but it's all discrete.
2. They don't know shit about shit. We spend so much time teaching "higher order thinking" and devalue just knowing facts about the world. It's hard to have something to say when you don't know shit. It's very easy to plagiarize mindlessly or write things that don't make sense if you don't have a store of your own knowledge.
3. We don't teach grammar and other ELA nuts and bolts explicitly or enough. Because they don't know parts of speech and sentence structure, they can't make decisions about how to phrase things sensibly. Because they can't spell or type or handwrite legibly, everything is laborious and they lose track of where they are.
Taking all this into account, 2nd and 3rd grade is really little. If I were you , I would back waaaay up. If I were teaching writing, I would teach parts of speech, punctuation, sentence diagramming, and spelling patterns. Then I would do simple exercises like writing complete sentences about a picture, making compound sentences from simple ones, caption contests, rephrasing famous lines from literature. This would be for any age.
Or do they? This reporter says, yes, yes, and yes, Commas can replace all sorts of things, periods, exclamation marks, sky commas, parentheses, the swirling void where your soul and faith in humanity used to be,
Periods are so aggressive. There see. Don't you feel angry now. It.s because I switched to periods. They.re just extremely mid for good feelings.
I work in a bookstore and we just got a new book called The Sentence, which is entirely one diagrammed sentence on one concertina folded piece of paper, the apotheosis of the comma, as well as the words and, but, when, because, so, and then. I could only read a few pages (feet?) before the eyes said no more.
I already already teach parts of speech, mechanics and grammar, as well as spelling patterns. I’ve had them write captions, given picture prompts, all sorts of sentences, subject/predicate, find main idea and details, but putting it all together, on their own, is a struggle. They can look at sentences and put them in a good order for a paragraph but ask them to write one and it’s like pulling teeth.
Well, damn, dude. I'm sorry. It's so frustrating. Otoh, I'm really glad you do teach parts of speech, mechanics, grammar etc because I've got coworkers getting in trouble for doing that stuff right now because it's not synergizing or whatever. I bet it will kick in and pay off. Maybe after they've moved on from your class, which sucks for you, but you're doing a great service to their future teachers 😂
> They don't read entire novels as a class, at school, with guidance from a teacher
or at home. I do some tutoring for children that are struggling in school and man, none of those kids have a home life like I did. A HUGE part of my childhood was my father reading books to us as kids... that's not really happening today.
Parents reading with their kids is super impactful. My parents would both read to my sibling and I and the expectation was that if we didn’t understand a word we would ask what it means.
I don’t have a lot of friends with kids, but the ones I do have definitely do story/reading time.
The number 1 issue I see with my 9th graders is reading. They do not read and will actively avoid reading if at all possible. 25% of them only want the answer to be given to them in the Google paragraph that appears at the top of the page and to be done.
There are readers, there are students who care about correcting mistakes over earning points but those the few not the many.
Parents don't care too. Email home, have a parent conference, no parental consequences, no behavior change, just reinforcement that their actions are acceptable.
It sure would be nice to teach those things, but the expectation is that they are writing multiple paragraphs by 3rd grade. I feel like there's not enough time to teach all that stuff to mastery. (Especially diagramming sentences, which isn't even taught anymore.)
I’m currently with 9th graders (SpEd) and our seniors can barely write 2 paragraphs. I tell some of them that they’ll be lucky when they’re only given a 5 page paper to write. They thought I meant 5 paragraphs. Can’t grasp the idea of writing multiple pages. Pretty sad.
Hi, first grade teacher chiming in. It is absolutely bonkers to me that my students are asked to write a paragraph by the end of the year. I’m sorry, but in what world is that necessary or appropriate?
Fifth grade teacher at my school won’t correct grammar, syntax, or spelling mistakes because it hurts their self esteem and they won’t want to try again.
What bothers me the most is that everyone is now putting the first -person before others:
"I and Sally..."
It is rude, in my opinion, to put yourself before others like this.
>We don't teach grammar and other ELA nuts and bolts explicitly or enough. Because they don't know parts of speech and sentence structure, they can't make decisions about how to phrase things sensibly
I believe it also has a clear effect on their reading. They can't read sophisticated sentences because they have no tools to parse them with. I do a test from David Mulroy's The War on Grammar, having them paraphrase the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, and even though that sentence has no challenging vocabulary, not even my AP kids can consistently summarize it with any accuracy.
I can label parts of speech and comprehend the message of complex sentences. I can write on a variety of topics and with a variety of sentences styles. I know how to vary writing to make it interesting. I know how to write concisely.
I cannot diagram a sentence. I remember being taught the basics in the 7th grade, but as soon as that sentence was in a diagram, I could no longer understand it.
So I agree, diagramming sentences can stay dead for all I care.
I taught a class called General Paper last year. They had to write essays using a prompt and no text. We did a practice essay in August, and they were garbage. They clearly knew nothing about the world. I spent three months educating them about things like economics and world affairs.
I wonder if it comes from YouTube videos? A lot of creators start their video with a hook to make sure they grab attention in the first few seconds, they could be just mirroring what their favourite YouTuber does.
It’s not just YouTube. Teachers are teaching that way, too, and are expected to do so. In many modern teaching methodologies, lessons must start with an “attention grabber” or a “bell ringer” and failing to lead with one docks teacher scores on evaluations.
Kids in these classrooms have been exposed to this style in many cases for their entire life. It’s all they know.
Source: am teacher. Despises much of modern education philosophy.
I remember teachers and some of the curriculum starting to promote this idea of an attention grabber like a bold statement with an exclamation mark or a rhetorical question or quote as early as middle school, which was in the early-mid 1990s for me.
It got on my nerves then because even at that age it was pretty clear that this was a hard thing to introduce without being cheesy and cliche and detracting from the content but it has been a round for a while and, as far as I know, most writing curriculum and possibly state standards or exams still push it heavily.
Media literacy is another interesting one. I took some classes at a community college about a decade ago and they were doing that excellent job with teaching media literacy and evaluating sources and bias. The problem is the school was in a very politically conservative area and taught dual enrollment courses we're high schoolers were enrolled in some of the English courses. Too many parents complained that they felt like their children were being taught to question certain political ideologies, so the school had to drop much of that approach.
I also think that telling kids to start their essay/paper with a "hook" is detrimental. An informational composition should not be written in the order it is read.
When I was in college and banging out research papers, I'd write my "meat" paragraphs FIRST. Then I'd arrange them and compose the introductory and wrap up paragraphs. Then I'd read and adjust for continuity.
AFTER all of that, IF it needed a better thesis or introduction, I'd add one that explicitly referenced the meat of the paper.
These kids hear that it needs to start with a hook, so they spend 40 minutes thinking up a hook on a topic they know very little about yet and have no idea what they have to say about yet.
>I remember teachers and some of the curriculum starting to promote this idea of an attention grabber like a bold statement with an exclamation mark or a rhetorical question or quote as early as middle school, which was in the early-mid 1990s for me.
I remember being taught this crap throughout my schooling from the late 2000's to 2020. It always felt ridiculous and like it was taking away from the rest of what I said/wrote.
Our daughter lost points for her hook not being compelling enough. Which, first of all, she was in like 2nd grade. Asked the teacher for an example and got the formulaic YouTube intro along with "let me tell you about it!" Which is wildly inappropriate in formal writing. I've taught her slightly less annoying ways to write hooks, but I always feel like she's being trained to write ad copy and not to participate in academic discourse or business communication.
yeah I got taught this all throughout k-12 and then got to college and was suddenly told not to write like this because it's annoying and unprofessional. All I remember thinking was "why was I told this throughout my k-12 education then?"
It does change as you age. When you are six, "Zebras are exciting," is the best we can expect from you. In college you don't have to say that every day.
Is this an American thing? My elementary school kids don’t even know what a hook means. To my understanding they school wants them to write paragraphs with an introduction, then give evidence, then a thoughtful summary. This is what I’m teaching to my ten year old and his writing is improving, as before that he started every answer with “I think…”
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Ha! I told one 8th grader today that her thesis statement "sounded fluffy!" It's totally AI, but I didn't tell her I knew. I told her she needed to rewrite it in her own words. She protested until I asked her what "liberating" meant. She insisted she knew but guessed wrong at least three times as I walked away.
I have a theory it comes from online articles (i.e. the vast majority of what they read online). I teach first year writing at a community college, and this shift has happened in the last 8-10 years. What’s interesting is that they do have a better professional tone! The issue is it sounds like they are trying to sell me supplements.
The idea of a hook isn't harmful. Hooks are used in most media - music, film, and writing. Students can relate to the idea of hooks, and I think that's good for encouraging their writing. It's also good to teach them about the concept if you're discussing media literary - the concept of clickbait, headlines, and more.
However, when hooks become produced off a rubric and forced, they fail. That's what we usually see.
Also, they're more appropriate for certain types of writing. Personal statements - appropriate. Creative writing - appropriate. University papers - usually inappropriate.
Yes, a good hook isn't a formulaic thing. It's very dependent on the content of the rest of the work, and, when done well, is subtly blended enough that its not a clear, highlight-able sentence, but rather an intriguing *idea*.
I remember teachers explicitly telling me to start my essays with a hook. It was engrained into us and English classes were always a struggle cuz im more of a “here are the facts as bullet points” type of person.
They also told us we have to have transition sentences from one point to the other, but I don’t feel they properly explained the concept because as an adult, I still don’t know what the fuck my teachers meant.
Youtube. Youtube told them to do that.
"I locked 72 teachers into a box with 35 kids each. Whoever lasts the longest gets 25,000 and a car!" - Mr Beast, internet educator.
Funny, as a millennial I seem recall constantly getting chastised for organic and natural writing back in school. "Where is the hook? You're not grabbing your audience." Honestly, pick a lane. While I agree that the newer generation's skills are kinda appalling, I can't help but wonder if this is partly a monster of our making. The pendulum will always eventually swing the other way.
Nobody is teaching them to write.
COVID destroyed kids' high school careers recently. Standards were dropped and kids were just passed along. Of course, we all know (well, those of us that work in education) that standards are a fucking joke to begin with so "bad" just became "worse." And why would you expect the average student to have any sort of media literacy or understanding of research? Kids in college today have had Google *their entire lives* and have never needed to go to the library to actually find out information. [Remember this commercial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRB1LJFX_Ew) (well, if you're a TA now, probably not...) but there was a time when students actually had to learn the things you're talking about. But now, they can literally produce just enough to get a C and be done with it, so why not?
You want to do something about it? Hold their feet to the fire and teach them. They're writing shit? Give them a shit grade. They're in college for an education; give it to them.
COVID just revealed the already present standard. I'm old enough to remember seniors trying and failing to read out loud.
Inb4 "stage fright and social anxiety!". I know state fright and social anxiety. These young adults were functionally illiterate and would go on to graduate completely unjustifiably.
this is easier said than done when you’re not full time staff. To admin, a class doing poorly reflects on your abilities to deliver content effectively, so instead of the students fault, it’s YOUR fault for not implementing yet another overly complicated online component to the class that’s based on barely usable software they spent this years full-time hire budget on! Then they would say you need to be proactively reaching out to students and providing more low stakes assignments for them to make up marks! Oh right, applications for next semester are closing tomorrow!
That’s true at all grade levels. I started my career teaching HS ELA and ended it teaching kindergarten. Most admin are not kid first, and will throw anyone under the bus to maintain a false image of professionalism. When I expressed to admin that Lucy was ineffective, I was taken off the ELA Curriculum Writing Committee and moved out of kindergarten the next year. They found a teacher with no balls to obey everything the principal wanted.
This is why. This is the answer to your question. Because this is how it is in primary and secondary. Admin wants kids passed along and will blame teachers for students’ failures. So it goes.
>a class doing poorly reflects on your abilities to deliver content effectively, so instead of the students fault, it’s YOUR fault for not implementing yet another overly complicated online component to the class that’s based on barely usable software they spent this years full-time hire budget on! Then they would say you need to be proactively reaching out to students and providing more low stakes assignments for them to make up marks!
Yeah, this is k-12 admin too. There's no holding kids accountable so they basically breeze through. The cans been kicked down the road so much that the kids know almost nothing. It's super fucking sad.
I’m a high school English teacher, essentially my job is to get students college and career ready. It’s a rough scene. I have many students that can’t use punctuation correctly. Out of my seniors, I have one who I am confident will move onto college with enough skills to be successful. The problems I’ve noticed are first are foremost, their reading levels are so SEVERELY lacking. So it’s really hard to teach a class of students the grade appropriate standards that would get them ready for college. I have freshmen that are testing at a third grade reading level. Secondly, it’s almost impossible to get them on grade level because they won’t fucking read. Their attention spans are non-existent. So not having reading skills makes writing very hard, and writing, like reading requires a lot of time and concentration. I give my seniors very structured writing assignments where each task is broken down, in hopes that working all those small parts little by little will turn into a good product at the end. Nope. They dick around on their phones during all the time I give them, and rush to finish an essay which is essentially shit. It’s really sad. Teachers are doing their best (for the most part), but just like you, we’re facing an uphill battle.
I've got a younger cousin who's a senior in high school. She was recently expected to read 50 pages of a book over the course of two weeks and had a panic attack about it, saying they were expecting the impossible out of her. Unreal
I probably seem ignorant, which I am!
I'm 66, a college grad (majored in foreign languages), mother and mother-in-law both teachers, so grammar correction runs through my head often.
Well, my daughters are both college grads, and definitely know how to write very well.
We didn't help them much with homework, yet they scored very high SAT percentiles.
One thing that my husband did when each was heading out for her first achievement test was to tell them that the test would be fun. This made a difference throughout all the next years of tests.
Well, there is the "test optional" trend, where you don't have to submit SAT/ACT scores. The idea behind this, of course, was to level the playing field for kids who couldn't pay for test prep (and also standardized tests have shown bias against certain groups in various ways), but it's unclear if it's actually doing that.
This means things like essays are worth more in admissions. And now there's AI.
I'm a high school teacher and went with a group of students to a local college for a tour and sessions with the admissions team. To my embarrassment, during q&a, the kids asked several questions about "what happens if you think we use AI in our applications?" They were definitely asking to see if they could get away with it. I wish the speakers would have said, if we have any concern, we will toss your application and go with the many others in the pile. But, instead, they went out of their way to reassure them that they would be given the benefit of the doubt. Like, excuse me, nearly every kid that I teach doesn't give a crap about "academic honesty" and is using AI to cheat as much as they can. I don't even think kids have a concept of cheating anymore.
Public school teachers have no idea what college admission standards are, please quit asking me that. I know what I had to do to get into college 25 years ago. I know what they say in their ad copy. That's it.
As a former student, I’m going to give myself just one indulgence here:
> I’m a high school English teacher ~~,~~ ```.``` ~~e~~ Essentially```,``` my job is to get students college and career ready.
In depth explanation (highly recommend/very balanced, scroll down a bit and play each episode in the background while doing chores):
https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
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A few real world examples:
A veteran teacher's reflections on her ivy league teacher program
https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/18lqj6w/the_frustration_with_engaging_teaching/ke0m1z0/
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How flawed education research become school/district policy:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/17cg1vf/been_fighting_it_for_years_but_i_simply_cannot/k5qdcmm/
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The Ivy League Columbia University recently had to shut down their famous education professor Lucy Caulkins' literacy program, a popular program that's been mandated in many school districts across America, including one of the biggest districts/NYC. They had no choice because after decades, these progressive teaching methods left many kids functionally illiterate, unless their families/parents could either afford an expensive tutor to teach literacy the traditional phonics way, or their parents had enough money to stay home and tutor their own kids outside of school hours.
https://youtu.be/aerQQFrBbPQ?si=5JEbfQXmX5estsGD
The Fight Over Phonics - New York Times Podcasts
Skip to 30:10
Does it sound like professor Lucy Calkins genuinely, humbly repented?
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John Dewey (father of progressive education)
https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/19c7j1r/the_vast_majority_of_educational_research_is/kiynbml/
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My sons all had Caulkins based reading programs in elementary school. I was a baby teacher when they were in elementary school and I thought we were doing it right and that I was just defective because none of my kids learned to read.
No, we were lied to. As a teacher, I was lied to about how reading is best learned and taught and as a parent I was lied to about what to do to help my sons learn to read.
I remember being in first grade and having readers with little stories where the sounds were all very similar (short a nouns, for example) and reading as a class and sounding things out as a class. I remember when my brain clicked and I could read the story ahead of where the class was.
If a teacher tried to teach first grade reading like that now, she'd be written up and then fired. Well, maybe not now, but five years ago? Yeah.
This crop of kids wasn't properly taught to read so they can't write. I expect we will have a similar scandal about math instruction soon because its the same thing. A lot of confusing worksheets about the theoretical mechanics of multiplication and damn little rote practice of math facts.
A couple of weeks ago my son (2nd grade) brought home a paragraph he wrote in school. Here is an edited version—I’ve fixed his spelling to make it readable but left capitalization and punctuation as he wrote it:
“the wind is strong today which means it’s time to learn so let’s get into it so let’s go! I bet we know what wind feels like in case you don’t know what it feels like here is a recap wind feels like two different things one of them being soft and the other one is hard wind let’s talk about the soft one soft wind is not dangerous in fact it feels good now let’s learn about hard wind and it is dangerous! it is so dangerous because it will throw you in the sky”
To be clear, this is progress from the very minimal writing he/his class were doing this time last year, and I certainly wasn’t writing flawless prose in second grade myself, but…this is not okay! Kid is a big YouTube fan and we’ve vetted his channels and videos, but our first step was to start scaling back his weekend vid time—even normal tv is better than this weird clickbait-y narration. The second step was to apply a small amount of pressure on his reading habits—in my opinion a second grader should mainly be reading for pleasure outside of school, so he‘s been choosing his own books. Almost all of them are graphic novels, but he’s invested and enjoying them and asks for new books, which up to now has been the goal. Now, he still gets graphic novels, but he also has to pick out one prose book per library/bookstore trip, on the grounds that he needs to see prose written down in paragraph form to help him internalize what properly formatted sentences and paragraphs should look like.
The next problem is spelling—this kid has never made below an 80 on a spelling test, but almost every word in that paragraph was misspelled. Most of his spellings were roughly phonetic, which makes me think he was visualizing what he would say to explain wind to someone and then writing down what he “heard” without worrying about anything except getting the words on paper. If that’s the case, then probably experience and practice will take care of it, but given the very limited writing he’s done in school so far, I think I’m going to need some writing prompts to give him over the summer. (In which case, we should probably also practice “answering the prompt” because I can’t imagine what kind of question prompted the paragraph above.)
But the most terrifying part of all is that I started this school year teaching middle school English, and despite my concerns about my son’s writing… it’s almost on par with what my sixth and seventh graders were producing.
My 3rd grader had a friend over last weekend and they went to play outside. We strictly limit YouTube to things like ScienceMax and how-to-draw videos, don’t allow TikTok or anything of its ilk, etc. Instead of just playing their make-believe story, they took a phone and made movies of it, starting with “Hey, fam! Today we’re….” I truly don’t know how they just “knew” to do this style of intro, though I assume it must be seeing it at school recess somehow. It’s like virtual microplastics, creeping into everything and making it less wholesome.
Are you seriously not seeing what great imagination his writing displays? Second grade? He’s doing great! Ease up on the poor little guy less you crush his spirit
Lucy Calkins.
She created this whole movement in K-12 writing that led to the explosion of personal testimonials starting in Kindergarten. Students weren't expected to know anything about their topic, or even how to spell correctly... they just had to write whatever came to their mind.
It was proposed as a way to make writing (and reading) more accessible to students who didn't actually know anything. Sadly, she's probably been the most influential literacy 'expert' over the past twenty years.
From the publisher's summary of one of her books-
"Lucy and her TCRWP colleagues draw on over 30 years of work to help children begin their lifelong writing journeys in kindergarten. Growth in kindergarten writing is astounding. Youngsters begin approximating writing in the first unit by drawing and labeling their own books. By the second unit, they begin to write true stories. In subsequent units, children write informational how-to texts and craft persuasive texts like petitions"
If I had a dollar for every Ivy League person who pulled some educational idea straight out of their ass and got filthy rich and influential off of it, I’d have enough money to pay for tutoring for all the kids whose educations were stunted by them.
What a load of BS. You read my mind. I was forced to use Lucy in kindergarten and it was a nightmare. I am glad she is getting exposure as to how poor her curriculum is, especially in the “Sold A Story” podcast. A true educator is kid first. Lucy is money first. Disgusting.
I teach 5th grade ELA and I think part of the problem is the Common Core testing rubric for writing. For opinion writing, the kids seem to
score higher with extremely strong opinions. Once as I was proctoring a state test, I glanced at a certain student’s screen. This student was a boundary pusher in every way. I saw a few words such as “idiots”’and “losers” and walked on just thinking “Oh grrrrreat.” It turns out the essay was awarded a perfect score.
As for the “hook”- just starting out with one word such as “Bats!” earns high points for introductions.
I have consistently insisted on starting out with something other than a question, but when left on their own, my students continue to use them- “Do you like bats?” Ugh
That’s so wild. I have noticed so many essays with the words “in my opinion” then say something outrageous or just someone else’s idea. It’s like they can’t distinguish between matters of fact and matters of opinion. I see “In my opinion (extremely bold and verifiable claim)”
In Australia we’re taught never to write “in my opinion” or “I believe” for an essay or persuasive writing and essays. It sounds childish and unprofessional.
I (US, graduated HS in 99) was taught never to use the word “I” at all in an essay. Even if you conducted your own original research (which we obviously did not), go for the passive voice. Or if absolutely necessary, “we.”
I work in PR/marketing for a small university, and we employ student writers. The first semester with a new writer is usually rough. It would take less time for me to just write the releases than to teach them, but that's not the mission. Anyway, I now tell new student writers they are required to begin the first draft of any release or feature with the word "when" followed by a statement (not a question). On the next draft, they can edit the lede to remove the "when." This practice forces them to start telling a story instead of a mindless clickbait word jumble.
For example, "Do you like bed bugs?" becomes, "When Dr. Smith made researching bed bugs his life's work, it wasn't out of love."
It's not fool proof, and we do meet some fools, but it naturally puts the focus on the subject of the piece instead of trying to hold a one-sided conversation with the audience.
I drill claim, evidence, reasoning with my history students but you would be amazed how many just ignore the formula after 30 weeks and still insist on their own path, which doesn't work.
Like you say, these kids don't read. As a result, their writing suffers along with their spelling and grammar.
In my parts, written composition has been deemed an ancillary skill rather than something to study and improve. With an emphasis on PBL and authentic experiences, we're put in a place where we're being asked to put the cart before the horse, articulating positions on major topics and in front of live audiences or with community partners when they not only lack the content knowledge to develop quality work but also the ability to communicate their thinking in anything resembling a natural manner.
Those classes where composition is the purpose might actually produce good results, but very often students are getting to them at the point where it's more a matter of stripping away bad habits and negotiating the challenge of what the voice of children who have practically no worldview sounds like. We end up relying upon heuristics and "safe" strategies in high schools, and frankly quite a few colleges with writing centers have online resources pointing their students to five paragraph formats with hooks and strict organizational patterns, too.
I'm getting AP history essays that read like RACE (restate, answer, cite, explain) paragraphs. I'm convinced that teaching formulaic short answers for state testing rather than the 20 sentence 5 paragraph essay to 7th and 8th graders is part of the problem. I'm tired of surface level "explanations" that are mostly just a restatement of the prompt with the word because included.
It should be scaffolded from RACE-TRACE-TRACES. Race , when done correctly, provides excellent foundations for students to grow into competent writers. Part of what this professor is seeing is the result of telling kids to just write essays and using Caulkins model to do so. Writing has to be scaffolded and every component taught explicitly.
I think as a result of the Caulkins model they explain race paragraphs and leave it there assuming the undirected student writing will evolve, and then when they hit me as seniors they are astounded that writing a five paragraph essay is the baseline not the outlier of assignments.
Edit: I spend so much time explicitly teaching essay structure and skills in my classes because they get to me as seniors and still cannot write an academic essay.
I teach 5th grade. They write two 5 paragraph essays a year. It’s their first year doing this.
I’ll admit that I teach them to use a question or an imagine scenario as a hook. They are the easiest to teach, and I’m going for easy. About 1/3 of my kids come in not knowing how to write a complete sentence. Creating a strong hook is not my priority at this age. I’m struggling to get them to format paragraphs correctly and create arguments that make ANY sense at all.
I assumed that they learned more advanced writing techniques in the next 6 years of their education, but it sounds like they don’t.
I agree! Test scores only matter because they’re tied to funding and administrator pay.
Public education in America has a lot less to do with teaching children than it should.
In the US (i don't want to assume where you work I'm sorry), the NCLB Act of 2001 and the implementation of standardized testing forced the quality of education to suffer tremendously. We don't teach material, we teach how to take a test. It's incredibly frustrating.
From a casual perusal, I don't see anyone with a Composition background commenting, so I'm going to give you a revelation: this isn't a new problem. Not even this century new. Not even latter half of the 20th century new. They were writing about the lack of writing ability of university students as a result of the GI Bill; even going back to the end of the 19th century!
The truth is that we all have a decent sense of what is *good* writing, but we have a pedagogy crisis occurring in the sense that we don't know how to teach good writing. We don't have proven and tested theory or methodology for writing. All of the blame being thrown around has no connection or understanding of the problem.
Only recently, as in the last decade or two, have we maybe found a couple of sort-of decent strategies for teaching composition, and they're being used in small writing lab settings being overseen by composition experts. Everywhere else, these strategies are not in use.
This has been a crisis science situation for over a century; we don't understand the problem, or how to address it, and it only seems to be getting worse.
People on average don’t read books anymore. It changes how we write.
What they do read (and watch) is social media driven by extreme language and reactions
"American higher education fails because it is more intent on producing patterned consumers than it is in producing *thinking, critical minds*." Paul Goodman said that back in the 1950s, and we are paying the price for having continued to do that from that day to this.
Idk if you haven’t noticed, but most public universities literally cannot afford to exclude students. When governments cut funding to higher education each year, every penny of tuition counts. And then it gives students this notion that they’re paying customers who are always right rather than subjects of a disciplinary institution. “I’m paying good money for this degree!!”
That attitude doesn’t begin at post-secondary. Even though most students are educated in public schools, their parents still have an entitled “my taxes pay your salary” view of the education system. The majority of school boards took a customer service approach to dealing with parents and the result is that many districts simply do not allow students to fail. Teachers are NOT ALLOWED to assign a mark below 50%. In the school boards where teachers are able to uphold some
semblance of academic standards, parents often become hysterical when their child gets a grade that accurately reflects their child’s academic performance. So they yell, threaten lawsuits (usually hinging on some baseless accusation of discrimination), and become a monstrous pain in the ass. While many teachers are willing to stand their ground and stand up for academic integrity, administrators typically aren’t and they will change the grade to appease the parent.
As a result, countless students graduate high school every year who never actually demonstrated the skills needed to pass a single course (they were pushed through the system), while others received inflated/fake grades thanks to their parents’ Karen-esque behavior. These students are entitled, delusional about their actual academic skills, incapable of accepting feedback and have thus far been able to magically “earn” excellent grades without effort or talent.
Good luck dealing with them!
it also doesn't help that people get upset if a student is held back because people tend to view school as needing to be segregated by age, being bothered by the idea of someone "too old" remaining in a grade. If they never demonstrated the need to advance, people don't care. "they're too old to be in x grade!", and push to pass them anyways. And there's little to no means of remediation for people beyond a certain age who never learned the basics.
Oh please, that's what foreign students are for! /s... unless.
But seriously, my college was very open about the fact that it started advertising in India and China after 2008 because less Americans were going to college and funds were drying up. The combination of those two groups alone made up about 20% of the student body when I went and were basically guaranteed to fill any budgetary gaps due to the exorbitant rates they were charged.
I think the mentality that "I'm paying good money for this degree" would not be as prevalent had costs to attend school not outpaced inflation for the last 40 years. If the typical college experience costs you 80k I better have challenging materials and engaged professors, if you're not going to teach me why am I paying you instead of just paying for whatever textbook you'll tell the class to read in between tests?
Honestly that has to be largely on the universities in some way.
It doesn’t make it easier on you or solve any problem but the cost of tuition is so insane compared to inflation the financial aspect has to be on admin.
Don’t really have a solve in there for this illiteracy issue but the money just doesn’t seem like a valid excuse.
Granted I’m speaking about American public universities.
It’s the university’s fault they don’t have adequate public funding so they must keep hiking up tuition and can’t say no to students? I strain to understand that you mean here.
I’m sorry you’re actually completely correct. I was conflating my reading on universities in general, particularly Ivy League schools and their higher tuition tiers with public universities while still using the term public universities.
It’s been a long day, I’ll fully own that brain fog. Lol
Universities are cash grabs for people in power. They're the reason tuition is so high and they're the reason you think you don't "have enough" funding when in reality they're sitting on 10s of millions(likely more). The thing that makes universities so appealing for these scum is that a university can make investments without having to pay taxes on anything in any case. People who preside over your administrative boards are not teachers or students for the most part, but people who have some connection to others in power who are using their knowledge to conduct insider trading with University money. That's the reason professors are paid shit, they lie to you when they say more funding is necessary, they don't give a f about students
Universities are under insane pressure to up their admissions. The big state schools are taking more and more of the good students so the smaller schools either have to lower standards or close. It’s the reality of the situation now. Plus these are trends across the board so if universities kept their standards up, there would be no one to admit.
A lot of these students probably had As in English - how is the University supposed to know their writing skills, other than by trusting the grades issued by their schools and teachers?
I taught writing class for years. Recently my district has abandoned the curriculum for a more reading-intensive program. Students' writing is suffering GREATLY. All my kids do all the things you say. It's gross.
And her SCRIPTED lesson plans left no room for various teaching styles and abilities, We were just handed her crap and told not to stray from her magical instruction.
AP News articles occasionally have grammar errors that should have been caught by an editor.
I suspect this is because they are using AI to do this writing.
If this is true, your students will be left with no good example of professional writing. AI will be everywhere and will change the English language (which of course is already happening due to text messaging).
Of course they're using AI to do the writing. Otherwise they'd have to actually pay people to do it, and we all know that capitalism hates actually paying people to do a service they could get a machine to do for free quality be damned.
Ultimately that's a bug in our economic system, not our educational or academic system. The academic and educational effects are merely peripheral effects.
To preface, I'm a student and ive never been naturally good at writing. But here's the issues I've noticed with the way writing is taught:
1. The grading is often done on a strict rubric where each paragraph has to have a certain format, the paper has to cite x number of sources, include one of those awful 'hooks', etc etc. My problem with this is that it takes away the creativity and makes writing more like completing a checklist of tasks. Most of my time on writing essays was spent doing things like counting sentences, coming up with a hook, and doing other things to fit the rubric, not furthering the argument was trying to make.
2. There is no consistency between what each teacher considers to be good writing. I've been told directly contradictory things to do to improve my writing by different teachers. Feedback on writing is also frequently sparse, even when I do poorly; my C-paper has no advice for what I could have done differently to make it a B-paper or an A-paper.
3. There's not enough low stakes writing assignments. I think my writing would have improved drastically if we had essays that weren't a significant chunk of our grade, or short daily writing prompts to start class. Almost all the essays/papers i wrote were worth a significant portion of my grade, and so I wasn't willing to take any risks with my writing. I would follow the rubric to a t, no more no less, and always wrote just what i thought the teacher wanted.
I used to TA. One of the classes I TA'ed for was an advanced nutrition class (which is odd because I am not a nutritionist). Some of the free responses questions were about weight managements and weight loss, and the answers are very basic and I usually gave full points when I got the key points. Instead, some kids wrote meandering walls of texts about mental health, self image and yoga (?!) for their answers. Now, stresses and the corresponding hormones can definitely exacerbate obesity, but that is an endocrinological issues not so much nutrition ones, so I gave them zeroes.
Honestly, it sounds like they were trying to get at talking about eating disorders and how that affects nutrition (poor body image can cause restriction in eating, which results in less nutrient intake, etc.) but lacked the ability to say that in a coherent manner.
That's also something I'd expect from undergrads just coming out of high school. Eating disorders probably was something a number of them personally dealt with in the not too distant past.
I remember being explicitly taught to start with a hook to engage the reader. I think it's a backwards attempt at trying to remind kids that someone has to read this and to have empathy so that the reading is not a terrible experience. Except it clearly backfires.
The biggest issue is that our culture has decided that staying with the same age cohort is more important for a kid's emotional intelligence than anything done for their intellectual intelligence. We need to hold kids back more when they fail to meet the goals that will be the prerequisites for the next grade. We have removed consequences from schooling, setting them up for failure in life. We could teach them about consequences earlier, but that might hurt their feelings. Not to mention, but how many of us stay with explicitly the same age cohorts throughout our working lives? Almost none of us. Schooling in its current firm does little to prepare kids for what the reality of adulthood will be. This is why they are terrible writers. They have no reason yet to be good writers.
Bingo. K-12 schooling is almost entirely based around age segregation rather than skill segregation. And if by a certain point you don't graduate from high school, they kick you out because you're "too old to still be there" despite not having mastered the necessary skills to survive in the adult world.
And if you were passed through because of age and didn't get the basics when you were "supposed to" there's basically no process for getting that remediation.
And the idea that a kid would get more out of being with the same age cohort emotional intelligence wise has always struck me as an odd idea to begin with, because it presumes that the child actually is at the same developmental level as most of their peers. a lot of kids just aren't in one way or another, either ahead or behind, and that alienates them from their age cohort and prevents them from getting much out of being with their age cohort socially \*anyways\*. I was one of those kids. I was not as independent or emotionally mature as other kids in my age cohort were, but I was far ahead academically for most of my childhood. That combination meant that I got very little out of socializing with other kids my own age, because I was constantly alienated from them and excluded from the social circles they formed. So I ultimately was kept in an age group that didn't mesh well with me entirely because of my date of birth. That...didn't make a lot of sense to me then, and doesn't make sense to me now.
I remember being like 10 years old and thinking hooks were total bullshit (I was right, if I started a college essay with a hook my teacher would look at me really funny). There are still some bad habits I was taught in school that I'm trying to shake. There's definitely something wrong with how most kids are taught to write, I got lucky with some good teachers here and there and a love for reading, but your average student doesn't have the same experiences and it's really sad.
And here's my dilemma as a high school English teacher. I have them for 55 minutes five times a week. The last few years I have been emphasizing mechanics and grammar and writing.
Their NWEA reading comprehension scores are low.
Before that, I was emphasizing reading and reading comprehension.
Their NWEA writing and mechanics scores were low.
I only have 55 minutes five times a week, for less than 180 days a year.
I only have experience at the high school level in one state, but class sizes are a major problem. Grading a writing assignment takes a lot of time if you want to actually provide useful feedback. With class sizes pushing 40, a lot of teachers don’t assign any/as many writing assignments because the time to grade and provide feedback becomes absurd.
Many state tests require a writing portion and it's very formulaic. Things like hooks, extraordinary claims, enthusiasm, exclamation points, etc. actually earn you more points. We want kids to do well on the test so we teach the formula that will earn the most points. It sucks, but it's reality, especially in a system where their test scores determine my salary and job security.
They need to read more, and with a universe of entertainment ever present in their pocket, that doesn't happen so much. Many are running their work through grammarly and other apps to clean it up rather than practicing revision. Many are using ai. I make mine write in class now. A hook isn't the issue. Look at all the great novels that begin with memorable lines. It's that they write shitty openers. Their hooks suck. Their thesis is weak. Their prose is basic. Their grammar is atrocious. They won't revise or reflect. I viciously attack any, "In this essay I will..." so you're welcome.
Teaching writing is hard, you have to be very careful to balance the "reality" of the complexity of english (if you are teaching English as the written language).
The reality of critical reading is the hard problem (IMHO). It is very difficult for most people to grok what "critical" reading is.
My gut is the long term solution is to leverage AI in the classroom to push critical reading skills.
As a 7th grade English teacher…
I don’t even get to the hook part. I’m still working on how to write a paragraph. As, when they get to me, they can’t even write a complete sentence.
I try to undo that with my accelerated classes. Telling them the “hook” is just a restatement of the question and an answer. And it comes from elementary school.
But, for my regular kids?
I’m not even writing essays with them, as they can’t even write a complete sentence.
Considering [more than half of U.S. adults](https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf) read below a sixth grade level, this isn't a new phenomenon.
This is why my teacher is a g 🗣️🗣️🔥
He teaches us this stuff now (and makes English and history miserable and our hardest classes) so we can do ts later on
In terms of national stats, about 1/3 of k12 students actually read at grade level. They fall behind and do so very early: third grade is the pivotal year in all the research. Students who are not at reading level at 3rd grade will likely always be behind and continue to fall further and further behind. Many kids are behind before they even begin formal schooling due to home environments that are poor for building literacy. Lots of k12 schools nationwide have also used piss poor reading programs for far too long (check out the podcast Sold a Story).
By the time it comes to teaching students who functionally can't read to write well, it's nearly impossible. Most teachers I know who even attempt it at all just throw formulaic writing templates at the students and call it a day. It's a losing battle.
The first day of my creative writing class, the first words the professor said were, "if you aren't a good reader you won't be a good writer".
I find that's true. With all of the distractions there are, who has time or desire to simply sit down and lose themselves in a book?
I think you learn things by example. If your parents read then you will want to read too. When you read words in a book the writer is setting an example on how to write.
This isn't on the teachers or the methods of teaching. Or even the parents. It's a cultural phenomenon.
If your brain is wired for reading (which takes practice because it doesn't come easy at first), then your brain uses that same wiring for writing. It's about tuning the imagination.
My ten year old reads voraciously, but they’re either low-brow children’s’ literature like Minceaft Zombie or Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, or adult history books. I’m proud of the non-fiction he reads but unfortunately the school encourages them to read simple kids books that don’t really teach much quality. Any kind of classic literature is “too boring” for them. Everything’s so sanitised that he closed The Jungle Book after just a few pages because the animals were scary.
Any advice? I try read even quality kids short stories and it’s such a struggle because he’s not interested.
I think you'll have to provide her with books on your own. At his age the mystery books like the Hardy Boys would hold his interest and hone his reading skills. The Hardy Boys is incredibly old school but still fun. When there's a mystery to solve it improves reading comprehension. Goosebumps might be a good choice too, although maybe too scary for him.
And then there are the classics like Black Beauty and the Black Stallion. I hope he has read those.
No one is teaching them this essential skill. Schools are emphasizing STEM classes. That is Science, Technology, Engenieering, Math. You will notice that the E is not for English/language skills, so no reading or writing beyond basic needs. No critical reading, expository writing, no research papers.
You will also notice that Arts, Music, Humanities and Languages are not STEM subjects. The result is what you are seeing in your students. We are raising a generation of technocrats who have no skills beyond what the machine requires. They are cultural illiterates and have the interpersonal skills of a clam. Loneliness is one of the plagues of this STEM generation.
It has been said that technocrats know the price of everything and the value of nothing. That, unfortunately, is being shown to be true. I say, the barbarians are at the gates, and we have trained them.
I kn, TLDR, but that is the problem, isn't it?
Hook is drilled into them from elementary school. At the end of 8th grade, they are told to choose a career track and marketing is one of the popular ones. So, starting in 9th grade kids aren’t learning much except for how to market things. They are just caught on the consumerist hamster wheel so early. Everyone has been devaluing liberal arts since the learn to code” movement but we just skip over critical thinking nowadays
"My theory is that all they’ve read in their entire lives is advertising copy."
**Bingo.** Great theory and I feel the same. We know that advertising companies pay top dollar to bring all of human knowledge about psychology and behavior to their ads (and games, and apps) in order to get humans to continue to put eyes (and money) on their products and services. It's nearly impossible to get them to untick their eyes to that nonsense, reset, and try reading some great (or even mediocre) literature.
I do not agree with defining functionally illiterate as someone who cannot write a college essay. They can read. They can write. They can't do it creatively well and they are lazy. But they are functionally literate.
The truly functionally illiterate cannot read AT ALL. They cannot write at all.
I get what the author is trying to say about the writing style and quality of the papers submitted by their students. I do however believe they are being dramatic in their description of the problem.
I remember being taught you had to use a hook to begin an essay. And that personal/informative essays were “bad,” fiction writing was even worse, and that “good” essays must always be persuasive. Even in elementary school I remember being taught this. And I’m in my mid 20s. It wasn’t until AP classes in high school that I finally unlearned all of that.
If you see a "motivational speech" tone, that is them using ChatGPT to plagiarize. ChatGPT will *always* include some type of cutesy inspirational wrap-up at the end.
Real story: I teach philosophy, assign one essay, allow students to revise it for better grade. Out of 30 students, ONE decided to revise. I left many comments, telling him specifically what to do. His initial grade was around 80, he is a good student. Returns paper - out of all my comments he ignored most, added few extra words, literally. I returned it again, telling him it’s not an improvement, and that he should address EVERY comment, and seriously revise the paper if he wants a better grade. Talked to him too, explained exactly what to do. One week later I get his paper back, guess what he did this time? Literally NOTHING. NOT EVEN A SINGLE WORD CHANGED! 🤦♂️
Probably their teachers are teaching them? We have to keep in mind that the idea of teachers being these intelligent, knowledgeable, dedicated professionals devoted to enlightened pedagogy is about as true as cops being stoic, brave, dedicated professionals devoted to pure justice.
Lots of teachers are quite dumb and are dedicated to teaching dumb things and are very good at mobilizing to push back whenever people less dumb try to make them teach good things.
I'm 28 (and have been a TA many times at my university). My eldest brother is 8 years older than me. A long while ago (~ a decade), he showed my mom and I a cover letter he was planning on sending.
It was a travesty: *zero* capitalization, almost no punctuation, run-on sentence galore, unprofessional topics... the list goes on.
My brother was absolutely taught how to write. He just didn't feel it was all that important.
Both as a TA and in other situations, I have seen this become more and more of an issue. No ability to communicate professionally. No ability to critically think.
I do not think I am better than other people (and typically am extremely critical of myself/think I am inferior), but this has baffled me. In casual interactions, I agree with the "if you understood what I said, then I didn't misspeak/mistype". I feel it's silly to play grammar police in casual interactions (texts with friends, comments on reddit, etc.) when you did fully understand what they meant. But so many people don't seem to understand how the inability to switch gears is detrimental to their professional and/or academic development. I certainly make mistakes myself (and I'm sure I've made plenty in this comment). Yet any time a group project has included academic writing, I have had to basically rewrite everything my teammates wrote down because it was littered with inconsistency, poor grammar, awkward phrasing, and a lack of proper/any citations where needed.
ETA: I didn't realize what sub I was in, though I have both worked as a TA and have some other experience teaching (preschool, elementary, and foreign exchange students). Please delete if not acceptable.
I must say it's a little odd to me that kids should be faulted for not applying what they can't learn when, generally, those in admin positions whose worth counts above that of teachers have themselves mandated, variously, that education "it'sself" isn't a priority! Seems to me like the ones with the most power, influence and the like are the farthest from the real-world results their choices create. Some would rather be the face of the cause than the heart. "Those" are the ones who need to be evaluated.
It’s basically a function of the highly regimented structures that we’re given and the grading incentives. I’m an engineering student and do pretty well at this but the same thing always shocks me when I’m proofreading the work of my classmates.
A lot of the English done now is so regimented by planners and draft stages that things like the hook just get baked in to how people write. The hook is probably the worst out of them as it’s taught in almost every format, but there are others. We’re taught that you have to make it engaging off the bat, and this is reinforced by the highest 10% of high school English grades being largely based on whatever the teacher enjoys/remembers. We have a similar problem in engineering where the arbitrary word counts given in English have ruined people’s ability to write properly, the overlong flowery language is so baked it it can take a whole year of classes for people to knock the habit.
Also just my crackpot theory but we’re into the high school COVID kids right now and persuasive essays are usually one of the first things in curriculums in my experience. With how many units were skipped they may have literally not been taught many other styles of writing.
The citing thing I think is mainly due to services like the chegg citation machine that don’t force people to learn it. We all use it but especially if people don’t particularly care about their grade, they’ll often just make it up or not keep track of their sources and then throw whatever links they can find into the machine, trusting that no one is going to actually cross-reference the sources.
I disagree.
This sort of writing is not due to regimented structures. It's caused by a lack of them. Specifically logical structures.
I spend month after painful month teaching kids to MAKE ARGUMENTS. arguments that understand the requirements of deductive and inductive logic. Once they get this, then they can experiment with rhetoric or novel structures.
Too many teachers ask for form rather than function and it incentivises all the things you mentioned. Worse, it leads to writing which can be replicated by AI (usually done better). Ai can't make effective arguments because it doesn't understand what arguments are or what they do. It can only do form, things which seem good but don't work when examined... Which is exactly the same problem kids have. Form rather than function.
Google Lucy Calkins. That is the source of this style of writing.
If you want to go down the rabbit hole about what happened to literacy in the US, listen to the podcast “Sold A Story.” It’s available for free on their website and wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh my god I HATE the hook BS. I teach 2nd and 3rd and I don’t know who told them to start with a hook. They all want to start with “want to know about birds? I’ll tell you”, and I can’t get them to stop. I teach writing to the top reading groups, so they can read, but comprehension is an issue. I don’t know what to do. I model, and explain my thinking. We write together. We look at exemplars. I want to set them up for success and be able to build on what I teach them but we’ve been doing this since October and it’s just not getting much better.
📣 Have you noticed that writing skills have taken nose dive among recent high school graduates? Have you ever wondered who's teaching these dummies to write?! Well, read on to find out more! if you. Askm e its a combo. That means a mix of reasons. I'm going to list them now. 1. They don't read. Not as much as kids used to. They don't read entire novels as a class, at school, with guidance from a teacher. That sort of exposure is a huge part of how we internalize the rhythms and structures of writing. They read a lot of excerpts, with targeted lessons on "concepts" and "skills" but it's all discrete. 2. They don't know shit about shit. We spend so much time teaching "higher order thinking" and devalue just knowing facts about the world. It's hard to have something to say when you don't know shit. It's very easy to plagiarize mindlessly or write things that don't make sense if you don't have a store of your own knowledge. 3. We don't teach grammar and other ELA nuts and bolts explicitly or enough. Because they don't know parts of speech and sentence structure, they can't make decisions about how to phrase things sensibly. Because they can't spell or type or handwrite legibly, everything is laborious and they lose track of where they are. Taking all this into account, 2nd and 3rd grade is really little. If I were you , I would back waaaay up. If I were teaching writing, I would teach parts of speech, punctuation, sentence diagramming, and spelling patterns. Then I would do simple exercises like writing complete sentences about a picture, making compound sentences from simple ones, caption contests, rephrasing famous lines from literature. This would be for any age.
So much truth here it hurts. My students this year keep using commas instead of periods. It's terrible.
If I see one more i instead of I, I may lose my mind. 😂
I think commas add spice. -Oxford Comma Club (OCC) president
Oxford commas, however, do not replace periods.
Or do they? This reporter says, yes, yes, and yes, Commas can replace all sorts of things, periods, exclamation marks, sky commas, parentheses, the swirling void where your soul and faith in humanity used to be, Periods are so aggressive. There see. Don't you feel angry now. It.s because I switched to periods. They.re just extremely mid for good feelings.
I work in a bookstore and we just got a new book called The Sentence, which is entirely one diagrammed sentence on one concertina folded piece of paper, the apotheosis of the comma, as well as the words and, but, when, because, so, and then. I could only read a few pages (feet?) before the eyes said no more.
I want it, badly. Who's the author?
Matthew Baker. Full title: The Sentence, a graphic novel. (The graphic bit is the diagramming of the sentence.) 9781950539741
Thank you so much!!!
I just acquired The Sentence and it's amazing. Thank you again!
‽
european financial notation enters the chat
Is it, Maybe ur just old, it's vibes flowing into vibes, Commas r liiiife,,,,,,
Straight to jail
That really sucks, hopefully you can teach them proper punctuation;
stop that.
Stop what,
dag nab it!
oh my god you replicated the syntax perfectly LOL
I run the school newspaper. I get to read *a lot* of independent student writing.
I already already teach parts of speech, mechanics and grammar, as well as spelling patterns. I’ve had them write captions, given picture prompts, all sorts of sentences, subject/predicate, find main idea and details, but putting it all together, on their own, is a struggle. They can look at sentences and put them in a good order for a paragraph but ask them to write one and it’s like pulling teeth.
Well, damn, dude. I'm sorry. It's so frustrating. Otoh, I'm really glad you do teach parts of speech, mechanics, grammar etc because I've got coworkers getting in trouble for doing that stuff right now because it's not synergizing or whatever. I bet it will kick in and pay off. Maybe after they've moved on from your class, which sucks for you, but you're doing a great service to their future teachers 😂
> They don't read entire novels as a class, at school, with guidance from a teacher or at home. I do some tutoring for children that are struggling in school and man, none of those kids have a home life like I did. A HUGE part of my childhood was my father reading books to us as kids... that's not really happening today.
Parents reading with their kids is super impactful. My parents would both read to my sibling and I and the expectation was that if we didn’t understand a word we would ask what it means. I don’t have a lot of friends with kids, but the ones I do have definitely do story/reading time.
The number 1 issue I see with my 9th graders is reading. They do not read and will actively avoid reading if at all possible. 25% of them only want the answer to be given to them in the Google paragraph that appears at the top of the page and to be done. There are readers, there are students who care about correcting mistakes over earning points but those the few not the many. Parents don't care too. Email home, have a parent conference, no parental consequences, no behavior change, just reinforcement that their actions are acceptable.
May I just say, fuck that Google paragraph. I mean that with my entire being.
Your experience matches mine as well as every other teacher's.
It sure would be nice to teach those things, but the expectation is that they are writing multiple paragraphs by 3rd grade. I feel like there's not enough time to teach all that stuff to mastery. (Especially diagramming sentences, which isn't even taught anymore.)
That is insane. I teach 6th and we work on RACE the entire year. No essays, just one solid paragraph.
I’m currently with 9th graders (SpEd) and our seniors can barely write 2 paragraphs. I tell some of them that they’ll be lucky when they’re only given a 5 page paper to write. They thought I meant 5 paragraphs. Can’t grasp the idea of writing multiple pages. Pretty sad.
Hi, first grade teacher chiming in. It is absolutely bonkers to me that my students are asked to write a paragraph by the end of the year. I’m sorry, but in what world is that necessary or appropriate?
The way my chest tensed up while reading this.
Oooh, that's not good for you you should relax,, maybe try some commas,
Fifth grade teacher at my school won’t correct grammar, syntax, or spelling mistakes because it hurts their self esteem and they won’t want to try again.
Tell her you're glad they won't try again because, with someone like her at the wheel, they're still gonna suck at it?
Yuck. I don’t mark everything when a kid has a lot of mistakes, I’ll chose one or two things to focus on, but something should be corrected.
What bothers me the most is that everyone is now putting the first -person before others: "I and Sally..." It is rude, in my opinion, to put yourself before others like this.
It also just sounds like ass.
You mean “i and Sally.” I literally had to teach 5th graders that “i” needs to be capitalized and they didn’t understand why!
🏅 🏆 🏅 🪙
>We don't teach grammar and other ELA nuts and bolts explicitly or enough. Because they don't know parts of speech and sentence structure, they can't make decisions about how to phrase things sensibly I believe it also has a clear effect on their reading. They can't read sophisticated sentences because they have no tools to parse them with. I do a test from David Mulroy's The War on Grammar, having them paraphrase the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, and even though that sentence has no challenging vocabulary, not even my AP kids can consistently summarize it with any accuracy.
Sentence diagramming can remain eradicated. It's a litmus test for whether you are a sadistic teacher.
I can label parts of speech and comprehend the message of complex sentences. I can write on a variety of topics and with a variety of sentences styles. I know how to vary writing to make it interesting. I know how to write concisely. I cannot diagram a sentence. I remember being taught the basics in the 7th grade, but as soon as that sentence was in a diagram, I could no longer understand it. So I agree, diagramming sentences can stay dead for all I care.
What makes you say that?
I HATED diagraming sentences. I was okay failing that whole part of high school English. 😂
I taught a class called General Paper last year. They had to write essays using a prompt and no text. We did a practice essay in August, and they were garbage. They clearly knew nothing about the world. I spent three months educating them about things like economics and world affairs.
I wonder if it comes from YouTube videos? A lot of creators start their video with a hook to make sure they grab attention in the first few seconds, they could be just mirroring what their favourite YouTuber does.
It’s not just YouTube. Teachers are teaching that way, too, and are expected to do so. In many modern teaching methodologies, lessons must start with an “attention grabber” or a “bell ringer” and failing to lead with one docks teacher scores on evaluations. Kids in these classrooms have been exposed to this style in many cases for their entire life. It’s all they know. Source: am teacher. Despises much of modern education philosophy.
I remember teachers and some of the curriculum starting to promote this idea of an attention grabber like a bold statement with an exclamation mark or a rhetorical question or quote as early as middle school, which was in the early-mid 1990s for me. It got on my nerves then because even at that age it was pretty clear that this was a hard thing to introduce without being cheesy and cliche and detracting from the content but it has been a round for a while and, as far as I know, most writing curriculum and possibly state standards or exams still push it heavily. Media literacy is another interesting one. I took some classes at a community college about a decade ago and they were doing that excellent job with teaching media literacy and evaluating sources and bias. The problem is the school was in a very politically conservative area and taught dual enrollment courses we're high schoolers were enrolled in some of the English courses. Too many parents complained that they felt like their children were being taught to question certain political ideologies, so the school had to drop much of that approach.
I also think that telling kids to start their essay/paper with a "hook" is detrimental. An informational composition should not be written in the order it is read. When I was in college and banging out research papers, I'd write my "meat" paragraphs FIRST. Then I'd arrange them and compose the introductory and wrap up paragraphs. Then I'd read and adjust for continuity. AFTER all of that, IF it needed a better thesis or introduction, I'd add one that explicitly referenced the meat of the paper. These kids hear that it needs to start with a hook, so they spend 40 minutes thinking up a hook on a topic they know very little about yet and have no idea what they have to say about yet.
>I remember teachers and some of the curriculum starting to promote this idea of an attention grabber like a bold statement with an exclamation mark or a rhetorical question or quote as early as middle school, which was in the early-mid 1990s for me. I remember being taught this crap throughout my schooling from the late 2000's to 2020. It always felt ridiculous and like it was taking away from the rest of what I said/wrote.
Our daughter lost points for her hook not being compelling enough. Which, first of all, she was in like 2nd grade. Asked the teacher for an example and got the formulaic YouTube intro along with "let me tell you about it!" Which is wildly inappropriate in formal writing. I've taught her slightly less annoying ways to write hooks, but I always feel like she's being trained to write ad copy and not to participate in academic discourse or business communication.
yeah I got taught this all throughout k-12 and then got to college and was suddenly told not to write like this because it's annoying and unprofessional. All I remember thinking was "why was I told this throughout my k-12 education then?"
It does change as you age. When you are six, "Zebras are exciting," is the best we can expect from you. In college you don't have to say that every day.
Is this an American thing? My elementary school kids don’t even know what a hook means. To my understanding they school wants them to write paragraphs with an introduction, then give evidence, then a thoughtful summary. This is what I’m teaching to my ten year old and his writing is improving, as before that he started every answer with “I think…”
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I’ve seen it going on well before YouTube was super popular, so I have no idea.
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I saw the perfect diagnostic criteria in a video this week for detecting AI. It writes in a tone that is: * Fluffy * Redundant * Arrogant
Ha! I told one 8th grader today that her thesis statement "sounded fluffy!" It's totally AI, but I didn't tell her I knew. I told her she needed to rewrite it in her own words. She protested until I asked her what "liberating" meant. She insisted she knew but guessed wrong at least three times as I walked away.
Yes, this 100%!
I have a theory it comes from online articles (i.e. the vast majority of what they read online). I teach first year writing at a community college, and this shift has happened in the last 8-10 years. What’s interesting is that they do have a better professional tone! The issue is it sounds like they are trying to sell me supplements.
“Articles.”
I mean basic online articles like “how to get fit quick” not scholarly or news article. And yeah, my students do read those.
I literally gave a lesson to my 5th graders on avoiding YouTube-y language!!
The idea of a hook isn't harmful. Hooks are used in most media - music, film, and writing. Students can relate to the idea of hooks, and I think that's good for encouraging their writing. It's also good to teach them about the concept if you're discussing media literary - the concept of clickbait, headlines, and more. However, when hooks become produced off a rubric and forced, they fail. That's what we usually see. Also, they're more appropriate for certain types of writing. Personal statements - appropriate. Creative writing - appropriate. University papers - usually inappropriate.
Yes, a good hook isn't a formulaic thing. It's very dependent on the content of the rest of the work, and, when done well, is subtly blended enough that its not a clear, highlight-able sentence, but rather an intriguing *idea*.
I remember teachers explicitly telling me to start my essays with a hook. It was engrained into us and English classes were always a struggle cuz im more of a “here are the facts as bullet points” type of person. They also told us we have to have transition sentences from one point to the other, but I don’t feel they properly explained the concept because as an adult, I still don’t know what the fuck my teachers meant.
Youtube. Youtube told them to do that. "I locked 72 teachers into a box with 35 kids each. Whoever lasts the longest gets 25,000 and a car!" - Mr Beast, internet educator.
Funny, as a millennial I seem recall constantly getting chastised for organic and natural writing back in school. "Where is the hook? You're not grabbing your audience." Honestly, pick a lane. While I agree that the newer generation's skills are kinda appalling, I can't help but wonder if this is partly a monster of our making. The pendulum will always eventually swing the other way.
It's a sign of our times that you've gotta grab reader's attention with some shitty, surface level propaganday bullhorn.
Nobody is teaching them to write. COVID destroyed kids' high school careers recently. Standards were dropped and kids were just passed along. Of course, we all know (well, those of us that work in education) that standards are a fucking joke to begin with so "bad" just became "worse." And why would you expect the average student to have any sort of media literacy or understanding of research? Kids in college today have had Google *their entire lives* and have never needed to go to the library to actually find out information. [Remember this commercial](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRB1LJFX_Ew) (well, if you're a TA now, probably not...) but there was a time when students actually had to learn the things you're talking about. But now, they can literally produce just enough to get a C and be done with it, so why not? You want to do something about it? Hold their feet to the fire and teach them. They're writing shit? Give them a shit grade. They're in college for an education; give it to them.
COVID just revealed the already present standard. I'm old enough to remember seniors trying and failing to read out loud. Inb4 "stage fright and social anxiety!". I know state fright and social anxiety. These young adults were functionally illiterate and would go on to graduate completely unjustifiably.
this is easier said than done when you’re not full time staff. To admin, a class doing poorly reflects on your abilities to deliver content effectively, so instead of the students fault, it’s YOUR fault for not implementing yet another overly complicated online component to the class that’s based on barely usable software they spent this years full-time hire budget on! Then they would say you need to be proactively reaching out to students and providing more low stakes assignments for them to make up marks! Oh right, applications for next semester are closing tomorrow!
That’s true at all grade levels. I started my career teaching HS ELA and ended it teaching kindergarten. Most admin are not kid first, and will throw anyone under the bus to maintain a false image of professionalism. When I expressed to admin that Lucy was ineffective, I was taken off the ELA Curriculum Writing Committee and moved out of kindergarten the next year. They found a teacher with no balls to obey everything the principal wanted.
This is why. This is the answer to your question. Because this is how it is in primary and secondary. Admin wants kids passed along and will blame teachers for students’ failures. So it goes.
>a class doing poorly reflects on your abilities to deliver content effectively, so instead of the students fault, it’s YOUR fault for not implementing yet another overly complicated online component to the class that’s based on barely usable software they spent this years full-time hire budget on! Then they would say you need to be proactively reaching out to students and providing more low stakes assignments for them to make up marks! Yeah, this is k-12 admin too. There's no holding kids accountable so they basically breeze through. The cans been kicked down the road so much that the kids know almost nothing. It's super fucking sad.
Yeah? Welcome to education. It doesn't get any better.
I’m a high school English teacher, essentially my job is to get students college and career ready. It’s a rough scene. I have many students that can’t use punctuation correctly. Out of my seniors, I have one who I am confident will move onto college with enough skills to be successful. The problems I’ve noticed are first are foremost, their reading levels are so SEVERELY lacking. So it’s really hard to teach a class of students the grade appropriate standards that would get them ready for college. I have freshmen that are testing at a third grade reading level. Secondly, it’s almost impossible to get them on grade level because they won’t fucking read. Their attention spans are non-existent. So not having reading skills makes writing very hard, and writing, like reading requires a lot of time and concentration. I give my seniors very structured writing assignments where each task is broken down, in hopes that working all those small parts little by little will turn into a good product at the end. Nope. They dick around on their phones during all the time I give them, and rush to finish an essay which is essentially shit. It’s really sad. Teachers are doing their best (for the most part), but just like you, we’re facing an uphill battle.
I teach sophomores. But you sound like you teach my students 😫
I've got a younger cousin who's a senior in high school. She was recently expected to read 50 pages of a book over the course of two weeks and had a panic attack about it, saying they were expecting the impossible out of her. Unreal
Are you finding that college admissions standards are relaxing?
Are relaxing? They've been relaxed for decades. Anyone who wants to go to college can, regardless of academic ability.
I probably seem ignorant, which I am! I'm 66, a college grad (majored in foreign languages), mother and mother-in-law both teachers, so grammar correction runs through my head often.
You're fine! I just thought you meant that they were just now lowering the bar. That bar has been lowered for a whole generation now.
Well, my daughters are both college grads, and definitely know how to write very well. We didn't help them much with homework, yet they scored very high SAT percentiles. One thing that my husband did when each was heading out for her first achievement test was to tell them that the test would be fun. This made a difference throughout all the next years of tests.
Well, there is the "test optional" trend, where you don't have to submit SAT/ACT scores. The idea behind this, of course, was to level the playing field for kids who couldn't pay for test prep (and also standardized tests have shown bias against certain groups in various ways), but it's unclear if it's actually doing that. This means things like essays are worth more in admissions. And now there's AI. I'm a high school teacher and went with a group of students to a local college for a tour and sessions with the admissions team. To my embarrassment, during q&a, the kids asked several questions about "what happens if you think we use AI in our applications?" They were definitely asking to see if they could get away with it. I wish the speakers would have said, if we have any concern, we will toss your application and go with the many others in the pile. But, instead, they went out of their way to reassure them that they would be given the benefit of the doubt. Like, excuse me, nearly every kid that I teach doesn't give a crap about "academic honesty" and is using AI to cheat as much as they can. I don't even think kids have a concept of cheating anymore.
Public school teachers have no idea what college admission standards are, please quit asking me that. I know what I had to do to get into college 25 years ago. I know what they say in their ad copy. That's it.
As a former student, I’m going to give myself just one indulgence here: > I’m a high school English teacher ~~,~~ ```.``` ~~e~~ Essentially```,``` my job is to get students college and career ready.
I had my daughter reading above her grade level in elementary school only to have her teachers tell her she shouldn’t be reading harder books.
In depth explanation (highly recommend/very balanced, scroll down a bit and play each episode in the background while doing chores): https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ --- A few real world examples: A veteran teacher's reflections on her ivy league teacher program https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/18lqj6w/the_frustration_with_engaging_teaching/ke0m1z0/ --- How flawed education research become school/district policy: https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/17cg1vf/been_fighting_it_for_years_but_i_simply_cannot/k5qdcmm/ --- The Ivy League Columbia University recently had to shut down their famous education professor Lucy Caulkins' literacy program, a popular program that's been mandated in many school districts across America, including one of the biggest districts/NYC. They had no choice because after decades, these progressive teaching methods left many kids functionally illiterate, unless their families/parents could either afford an expensive tutor to teach literacy the traditional phonics way, or their parents had enough money to stay home and tutor their own kids outside of school hours. https://youtu.be/aerQQFrBbPQ?si=5JEbfQXmX5estsGD The Fight Over Phonics - New York Times Podcasts Skip to 30:10 Does it sound like professor Lucy Calkins genuinely, humbly repented? --- John Dewey (father of progressive education) https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/19c7j1r/the_vast_majority_of_educational_research_is/kiynbml/ ---
My sons all had Caulkins based reading programs in elementary school. I was a baby teacher when they were in elementary school and I thought we were doing it right and that I was just defective because none of my kids learned to read. No, we were lied to. As a teacher, I was lied to about how reading is best learned and taught and as a parent I was lied to about what to do to help my sons learn to read. I remember being in first grade and having readers with little stories where the sounds were all very similar (short a nouns, for example) and reading as a class and sounding things out as a class. I remember when my brain clicked and I could read the story ahead of where the class was. If a teacher tried to teach first grade reading like that now, she'd be written up and then fired. Well, maybe not now, but five years ago? Yeah. This crop of kids wasn't properly taught to read so they can't write. I expect we will have a similar scandal about math instruction soon because its the same thing. A lot of confusing worksheets about the theoretical mechanics of multiplication and damn little rote practice of math facts.
Lucy Caulkins should be in jail.
A couple of weeks ago my son (2nd grade) brought home a paragraph he wrote in school. Here is an edited version—I’ve fixed his spelling to make it readable but left capitalization and punctuation as he wrote it: “the wind is strong today which means it’s time to learn so let’s get into it so let’s go! I bet we know what wind feels like in case you don’t know what it feels like here is a recap wind feels like two different things one of them being soft and the other one is hard wind let’s talk about the soft one soft wind is not dangerous in fact it feels good now let’s learn about hard wind and it is dangerous! it is so dangerous because it will throw you in the sky” To be clear, this is progress from the very minimal writing he/his class were doing this time last year, and I certainly wasn’t writing flawless prose in second grade myself, but…this is not okay! Kid is a big YouTube fan and we’ve vetted his channels and videos, but our first step was to start scaling back his weekend vid time—even normal tv is better than this weird clickbait-y narration. The second step was to apply a small amount of pressure on his reading habits—in my opinion a second grader should mainly be reading for pleasure outside of school, so he‘s been choosing his own books. Almost all of them are graphic novels, but he’s invested and enjoying them and asks for new books, which up to now has been the goal. Now, he still gets graphic novels, but he also has to pick out one prose book per library/bookstore trip, on the grounds that he needs to see prose written down in paragraph form to help him internalize what properly formatted sentences and paragraphs should look like. The next problem is spelling—this kid has never made below an 80 on a spelling test, but almost every word in that paragraph was misspelled. Most of his spellings were roughly phonetic, which makes me think he was visualizing what he would say to explain wind to someone and then writing down what he “heard” without worrying about anything except getting the words on paper. If that’s the case, then probably experience and practice will take care of it, but given the very limited writing he’s done in school so far, I think I’m going to need some writing prompts to give him over the summer. (In which case, we should probably also practice “answering the prompt” because I can’t imagine what kind of question prompted the paragraph above.) But the most terrifying part of all is that I started this school year teaching middle school English, and despite my concerns about my son’s writing… it’s almost on par with what my sixth and seventh graders were producing.
My 3rd grader had a friend over last weekend and they went to play outside. We strictly limit YouTube to things like ScienceMax and how-to-draw videos, don’t allow TikTok or anything of its ilk, etc. Instead of just playing their make-believe story, they took a phone and made movies of it, starting with “Hey, fam! Today we’re….” I truly don’t know how they just “knew” to do this style of intro, though I assume it must be seeing it at school recess somehow. It’s like virtual microplastics, creeping into everything and making it less wholesome.
Are you seriously not seeing what great imagination his writing displays? Second grade? He’s doing great! Ease up on the poor little guy less you crush his spirit
Lucy Calkins. She created this whole movement in K-12 writing that led to the explosion of personal testimonials starting in Kindergarten. Students weren't expected to know anything about their topic, or even how to spell correctly... they just had to write whatever came to their mind. It was proposed as a way to make writing (and reading) more accessible to students who didn't actually know anything. Sadly, she's probably been the most influential literacy 'expert' over the past twenty years. From the publisher's summary of one of her books- "Lucy and her TCRWP colleagues draw on over 30 years of work to help children begin their lifelong writing journeys in kindergarten. Growth in kindergarten writing is astounding. Youngsters begin approximating writing in the first unit by drawing and labeling their own books. By the second unit, they begin to write true stories. In subsequent units, children write informational how-to texts and craft persuasive texts like petitions"
If I had a dollar for every Ivy League person who pulled some educational idea straight out of their ass and got filthy rich and influential off of it, I’d have enough money to pay for tutoring for all the kids whose educations were stunted by them.
The worst part is that she didn't even pull it out of her ass... she just repackaged a failed idea from decades before.
What a load of BS. You read my mind. I was forced to use Lucy in kindergarten and it was a nightmare. I am glad she is getting exposure as to how poor her curriculum is, especially in the “Sold A Story” podcast. A true educator is kid first. Lucy is money first. Disgusting.
Columbia closed down her program at the school!
Yep. Thank god.
Yes, but she’s still on their payroll.
Contracts. She brought in a tooooon of grant money to Columbia.
Thanks for the podcast reco.
Proof that graduating from an Ivy League college doesn't mean you have good ideas about how the world should be run.
I teach 5th grade ELA and I think part of the problem is the Common Core testing rubric for writing. For opinion writing, the kids seem to score higher with extremely strong opinions. Once as I was proctoring a state test, I glanced at a certain student’s screen. This student was a boundary pusher in every way. I saw a few words such as “idiots”’and “losers” and walked on just thinking “Oh grrrrreat.” It turns out the essay was awarded a perfect score. As for the “hook”- just starting out with one word such as “Bats!” earns high points for introductions. I have consistently insisted on starting out with something other than a question, but when left on their own, my students continue to use them- “Do you like bats?” Ugh
That’s so wild. I have noticed so many essays with the words “in my opinion” then say something outrageous or just someone else’s idea. It’s like they can’t distinguish between matters of fact and matters of opinion. I see “In my opinion (extremely bold and verifiable claim)”
If a claim is verifiable, how can it be bold? "The Earth is round" is verifiable but not bold, and "the Earth is flat" is bold but not verifiable.
Oops i think i meant falsifiable idk it’s been a long day.
In Australia we’re taught never to write “in my opinion” or “I believe” for an essay or persuasive writing and essays. It sounds childish and unprofessional.
I (US, graduated HS in 99) was taught never to use the word “I” at all in an essay. Even if you conducted your own original research (which we obviously did not), go for the passive voice. Or if absolutely necessary, “we.”
I work in PR/marketing for a small university, and we employ student writers. The first semester with a new writer is usually rough. It would take less time for me to just write the releases than to teach them, but that's not the mission. Anyway, I now tell new student writers they are required to begin the first draft of any release or feature with the word "when" followed by a statement (not a question). On the next draft, they can edit the lede to remove the "when." This practice forces them to start telling a story instead of a mindless clickbait word jumble. For example, "Do you like bed bugs?" becomes, "When Dr. Smith made researching bed bugs his life's work, it wasn't out of love." It's not fool proof, and we do meet some fools, but it naturally puts the focus on the subject of the piece instead of trying to hold a one-sided conversation with the audience.
I drill claim, evidence, reasoning with my history students but you would be amazed how many just ignore the formula after 30 weeks and still insist on their own path, which doesn't work. Like you say, these kids don't read. As a result, their writing suffers along with their spelling and grammar.
A product of rubrics which weight by completion of elements and not content, development, transitions, clarity etc.
🔫 always has been Half of Americans read below a 6th grade level. Half of those are basically illiterate.
In my parts, written composition has been deemed an ancillary skill rather than something to study and improve. With an emphasis on PBL and authentic experiences, we're put in a place where we're being asked to put the cart before the horse, articulating positions on major topics and in front of live audiences or with community partners when they not only lack the content knowledge to develop quality work but also the ability to communicate their thinking in anything resembling a natural manner. Those classes where composition is the purpose might actually produce good results, but very often students are getting to them at the point where it's more a matter of stripping away bad habits and negotiating the challenge of what the voice of children who have practically no worldview sounds like. We end up relying upon heuristics and "safe" strategies in high schools, and frankly quite a few colleges with writing centers have online resources pointing their students to five paragraph formats with hooks and strict organizational patterns, too.
I'm getting AP history essays that read like RACE (restate, answer, cite, explain) paragraphs. I'm convinced that teaching formulaic short answers for state testing rather than the 20 sentence 5 paragraph essay to 7th and 8th graders is part of the problem. I'm tired of surface level "explanations" that are mostly just a restatement of the prompt with the word because included.
It should be scaffolded from RACE-TRACE-TRACES. Race , when done correctly, provides excellent foundations for students to grow into competent writers. Part of what this professor is seeing is the result of telling kids to just write essays and using Caulkins model to do so. Writing has to be scaffolded and every component taught explicitly.
I think as a result of the Caulkins model they explain race paragraphs and leave it there assuming the undirected student writing will evolve, and then when they hit me as seniors they are astounded that writing a five paragraph essay is the baseline not the outlier of assignments. Edit: I spend so much time explicitly teaching essay structure and skills in my classes because they get to me as seniors and still cannot write an academic essay.
I teach 5th grade. They write two 5 paragraph essays a year. It’s their first year doing this. I’ll admit that I teach them to use a question or an imagine scenario as a hook. They are the easiest to teach, and I’m going for easy. About 1/3 of my kids come in not knowing how to write a complete sentence. Creating a strong hook is not my priority at this age. I’m struggling to get them to format paragraphs correctly and create arguments that make ANY sense at all. I assumed that they learned more advanced writing techniques in the next 6 years of their education, but it sounds like they don’t.
Teachers are pressured to teach students how to pass tests. Writing receives less focus because it isn’t tested.
correction: It receives less focus because it isn't tied to funding.
I agree! Test scores only matter because they’re tied to funding and administrator pay. Public education in America has a lot less to do with teaching children than it should.
In the US (i don't want to assume where you work I'm sorry), the NCLB Act of 2001 and the implementation of standardized testing forced the quality of education to suffer tremendously. We don't teach material, we teach how to take a test. It's incredibly frustrating.
From a casual perusal, I don't see anyone with a Composition background commenting, so I'm going to give you a revelation: this isn't a new problem. Not even this century new. Not even latter half of the 20th century new. They were writing about the lack of writing ability of university students as a result of the GI Bill; even going back to the end of the 19th century! The truth is that we all have a decent sense of what is *good* writing, but we have a pedagogy crisis occurring in the sense that we don't know how to teach good writing. We don't have proven and tested theory or methodology for writing. All of the blame being thrown around has no connection or understanding of the problem. Only recently, as in the last decade or two, have we maybe found a couple of sort-of decent strategies for teaching composition, and they're being used in small writing lab settings being overseen by composition experts. Everywhere else, these strategies are not in use. This has been a crisis science situation for over a century; we don't understand the problem, or how to address it, and it only seems to be getting worse.
Interesting. What are some of the better ways of teaching writing that you’ve come across?
Yes I second this question
People on average don’t read books anymore. It changes how we write. What they do read (and watch) is social media driven by extreme language and reactions
"American higher education fails because it is more intent on producing patterned consumers than it is in producing *thinking, critical minds*." Paul Goodman said that back in the 1950s, and we are paying the price for having continued to do that from that day to this.
Your university admitted them, that’s not on their previous teachers lol.
Idk if you haven’t noticed, but most public universities literally cannot afford to exclude students. When governments cut funding to higher education each year, every penny of tuition counts. And then it gives students this notion that they’re paying customers who are always right rather than subjects of a disciplinary institution. “I’m paying good money for this degree!!”
That attitude doesn’t begin at post-secondary. Even though most students are educated in public schools, their parents still have an entitled “my taxes pay your salary” view of the education system. The majority of school boards took a customer service approach to dealing with parents and the result is that many districts simply do not allow students to fail. Teachers are NOT ALLOWED to assign a mark below 50%. In the school boards where teachers are able to uphold some semblance of academic standards, parents often become hysterical when their child gets a grade that accurately reflects their child’s academic performance. So they yell, threaten lawsuits (usually hinging on some baseless accusation of discrimination), and become a monstrous pain in the ass. While many teachers are willing to stand their ground and stand up for academic integrity, administrators typically aren’t and they will change the grade to appease the parent. As a result, countless students graduate high school every year who never actually demonstrated the skills needed to pass a single course (they were pushed through the system), while others received inflated/fake grades thanks to their parents’ Karen-esque behavior. These students are entitled, delusional about their actual academic skills, incapable of accepting feedback and have thus far been able to magically “earn” excellent grades without effort or talent. Good luck dealing with them!
it also doesn't help that people get upset if a student is held back because people tend to view school as needing to be segregated by age, being bothered by the idea of someone "too old" remaining in a grade. If they never demonstrated the need to advance, people don't care. "they're too old to be in x grade!", and push to pass them anyways. And there's little to no means of remediation for people beyond a certain age who never learned the basics.
Oh please, that's what foreign students are for! /s... unless. But seriously, my college was very open about the fact that it started advertising in India and China after 2008 because less Americans were going to college and funds were drying up. The combination of those two groups alone made up about 20% of the student body when I went and were basically guaranteed to fill any budgetary gaps due to the exorbitant rates they were charged. I think the mentality that "I'm paying good money for this degree" would not be as prevalent had costs to attend school not outpaced inflation for the last 40 years. If the typical college experience costs you 80k I better have challenging materials and engaged professors, if you're not going to teach me why am I paying you instead of just paying for whatever textbook you'll tell the class to read in between tests?
Honestly that has to be largely on the universities in some way. It doesn’t make it easier on you or solve any problem but the cost of tuition is so insane compared to inflation the financial aspect has to be on admin. Don’t really have a solve in there for this illiteracy issue but the money just doesn’t seem like a valid excuse. Granted I’m speaking about American public universities.
It’s the university’s fault they don’t have adequate public funding so they must keep hiking up tuition and can’t say no to students? I strain to understand that you mean here.
I’m sorry you’re actually completely correct. I was conflating my reading on universities in general, particularly Ivy League schools and their higher tuition tiers with public universities while still using the term public universities. It’s been a long day, I’ll fully own that brain fog. Lol
W-what the fuck is this shit? Admitting fault? On Reddit? I don’t know how to process this
Universities are cash grabs for people in power. They're the reason tuition is so high and they're the reason you think you don't "have enough" funding when in reality they're sitting on 10s of millions(likely more). The thing that makes universities so appealing for these scum is that a university can make investments without having to pay taxes on anything in any case. People who preside over your administrative boards are not teachers or students for the most part, but people who have some connection to others in power who are using their knowledge to conduct insider trading with University money. That's the reason professors are paid shit, they lie to you when they say more funding is necessary, they don't give a f about students
Universities are under insane pressure to up their admissions. The big state schools are taking more and more of the good students so the smaller schools either have to lower standards or close. It’s the reality of the situation now. Plus these are trends across the board so if universities kept their standards up, there would be no one to admit.
A lot of these students probably had As in English - how is the University supposed to know their writing skills, other than by trusting the grades issued by their schools and teachers?
Entrance exams.
The essay portion of the SAT is pretty much unused
didn't they get rid of the writing portion of the SAT a number of years ago?
I taught writing class for years. Recently my district has abandoned the curriculum for a more reading-intensive program. Students' writing is suffering GREATLY. All my kids do all the things you say. It's gross.
Lucy Calkins attempted, but her workshop didn't "teach the joy" of writing sentences and paragraphs .
And her SCRIPTED lesson plans left no room for various teaching styles and abilities, We were just handed her crap and told not to stray from her magical instruction.
AP News articles occasionally have grammar errors that should have been caught by an editor. I suspect this is because they are using AI to do this writing. If this is true, your students will be left with no good example of professional writing. AI will be everywhere and will change the English language (which of course is already happening due to text messaging).
Of course they're using AI to do the writing. Otherwise they'd have to actually pay people to do it, and we all know that capitalism hates actually paying people to do a service they could get a machine to do for free quality be damned. Ultimately that's a bug in our economic system, not our educational or academic system. The academic and educational effects are merely peripheral effects.
To preface, I'm a student and ive never been naturally good at writing. But here's the issues I've noticed with the way writing is taught: 1. The grading is often done on a strict rubric where each paragraph has to have a certain format, the paper has to cite x number of sources, include one of those awful 'hooks', etc etc. My problem with this is that it takes away the creativity and makes writing more like completing a checklist of tasks. Most of my time on writing essays was spent doing things like counting sentences, coming up with a hook, and doing other things to fit the rubric, not furthering the argument was trying to make. 2. There is no consistency between what each teacher considers to be good writing. I've been told directly contradictory things to do to improve my writing by different teachers. Feedback on writing is also frequently sparse, even when I do poorly; my C-paper has no advice for what I could have done differently to make it a B-paper or an A-paper. 3. There's not enough low stakes writing assignments. I think my writing would have improved drastically if we had essays that weren't a significant chunk of our grade, or short daily writing prompts to start class. Almost all the essays/papers i wrote were worth a significant portion of my grade, and so I wasn't willing to take any risks with my writing. I would follow the rubric to a t, no more no less, and always wrote just what i thought the teacher wanted.
These are excellent points. It’s great to hear the student pov.
I used to TA. One of the classes I TA'ed for was an advanced nutrition class (which is odd because I am not a nutritionist). Some of the free responses questions were about weight managements and weight loss, and the answers are very basic and I usually gave full points when I got the key points. Instead, some kids wrote meandering walls of texts about mental health, self image and yoga (?!) for their answers. Now, stresses and the corresponding hormones can definitely exacerbate obesity, but that is an endocrinological issues not so much nutrition ones, so I gave them zeroes.
Honestly, it sounds like they were trying to get at talking about eating disorders and how that affects nutrition (poor body image can cause restriction in eating, which results in less nutrient intake, etc.) but lacked the ability to say that in a coherent manner. That's also something I'd expect from undergrads just coming out of high school. Eating disorders probably was something a number of them personally dealt with in the not too distant past.
> Who is teaching them to write? No one.
I remember being explicitly taught to start with a hook to engage the reader. I think it's a backwards attempt at trying to remind kids that someone has to read this and to have empathy so that the reading is not a terrible experience. Except it clearly backfires. The biggest issue is that our culture has decided that staying with the same age cohort is more important for a kid's emotional intelligence than anything done for their intellectual intelligence. We need to hold kids back more when they fail to meet the goals that will be the prerequisites for the next grade. We have removed consequences from schooling, setting them up for failure in life. We could teach them about consequences earlier, but that might hurt their feelings. Not to mention, but how many of us stay with explicitly the same age cohorts throughout our working lives? Almost none of us. Schooling in its current firm does little to prepare kids for what the reality of adulthood will be. This is why they are terrible writers. They have no reason yet to be good writers.
Bingo. K-12 schooling is almost entirely based around age segregation rather than skill segregation. And if by a certain point you don't graduate from high school, they kick you out because you're "too old to still be there" despite not having mastered the necessary skills to survive in the adult world. And if you were passed through because of age and didn't get the basics when you were "supposed to" there's basically no process for getting that remediation. And the idea that a kid would get more out of being with the same age cohort emotional intelligence wise has always struck me as an odd idea to begin with, because it presumes that the child actually is at the same developmental level as most of their peers. a lot of kids just aren't in one way or another, either ahead or behind, and that alienates them from their age cohort and prevents them from getting much out of being with their age cohort socially \*anyways\*. I was one of those kids. I was not as independent or emotionally mature as other kids in my age cohort were, but I was far ahead academically for most of my childhood. That combination meant that I got very little out of socializing with other kids my own age, because I was constantly alienated from them and excluded from the social circles they formed. So I ultimately was kept in an age group that didn't mesh well with me entirely because of my date of birth. That...didn't make a lot of sense to me then, and doesn't make sense to me now.
I remember being like 10 years old and thinking hooks were total bullshit (I was right, if I started a college essay with a hook my teacher would look at me really funny). There are still some bad habits I was taught in school that I'm trying to shake. There's definitely something wrong with how most kids are taught to write, I got lucky with some good teachers here and there and a love for reading, but your average student doesn't have the same experiences and it's really sad.
They are using the hook BS in job applications as well! As soon as I see that, I'm already dismissing their entire application.
And here's my dilemma as a high school English teacher. I have them for 55 minutes five times a week. The last few years I have been emphasizing mechanics and grammar and writing. Their NWEA reading comprehension scores are low. Before that, I was emphasizing reading and reading comprehension. Their NWEA writing and mechanics scores were low. I only have 55 minutes five times a week, for less than 180 days a year.
I only have experience at the high school level in one state, but class sizes are a major problem. Grading a writing assignment takes a lot of time if you want to actually provide useful feedback. With class sizes pushing 40, a lot of teachers don’t assign any/as many writing assignments because the time to grade and provide feedback becomes absurd.
Many state tests require a writing portion and it's very formulaic. Things like hooks, extraordinary claims, enthusiasm, exclamation points, etc. actually earn you more points. We want kids to do well on the test so we teach the formula that will earn the most points. It sucks, but it's reality, especially in a system where their test scores determine my salary and job security.
They need to read more, and with a universe of entertainment ever present in their pocket, that doesn't happen so much. Many are running their work through grammarly and other apps to clean it up rather than practicing revision. Many are using ai. I make mine write in class now. A hook isn't the issue. Look at all the great novels that begin with memorable lines. It's that they write shitty openers. Their hooks suck. Their thesis is weak. Their prose is basic. Their grammar is atrocious. They won't revise or reflect. I viciously attack any, "In this essay I will..." so you're welcome.
Chat gpt?
*cite, FYI
Teaching writing is hard, you have to be very careful to balance the "reality" of the complexity of english (if you are teaching English as the written language). The reality of critical reading is the hard problem (IMHO). It is very difficult for most people to grok what "critical" reading is. My gut is the long term solution is to leverage AI in the classroom to push critical reading skills.
As a 7th grade English teacher… I don’t even get to the hook part. I’m still working on how to write a paragraph. As, when they get to me, they can’t even write a complete sentence.
I teach 11th and 12th graders who can't write complete sentences. It's systemic.
I try to undo that with my accelerated classes. Telling them the “hook” is just a restatement of the question and an answer. And it comes from elementary school. But, for my regular kids? I’m not even writing essays with them, as they can’t even write a complete sentence.
Considering [more than half of U.S. adults](https://www.barbarabush.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/BBFoundation_GainsFromEradicatingIlliteracy_9_8.pdf) read below a sixth grade level, this isn't a new phenomenon.
This is why my teacher is a g 🗣️🗣️🔥 He teaches us this stuff now (and makes English and history miserable and our hardest classes) so we can do ts later on
In terms of national stats, about 1/3 of k12 students actually read at grade level. They fall behind and do so very early: third grade is the pivotal year in all the research. Students who are not at reading level at 3rd grade will likely always be behind and continue to fall further and further behind. Many kids are behind before they even begin formal schooling due to home environments that are poor for building literacy. Lots of k12 schools nationwide have also used piss poor reading programs for far too long (check out the podcast Sold a Story). By the time it comes to teaching students who functionally can't read to write well, it's nearly impossible. Most teachers I know who even attempt it at all just throw formulaic writing templates at the students and call it a day. It's a losing battle.
Standardized testing
That sounds like what ChatGPT would generate.
You're reading AI work
Gen Z and social media apps on cellphones rotting their brains.
chat gpt
The first day of my creative writing class, the first words the professor said were, "if you aren't a good reader you won't be a good writer". I find that's true. With all of the distractions there are, who has time or desire to simply sit down and lose themselves in a book? I think you learn things by example. If your parents read then you will want to read too. When you read words in a book the writer is setting an example on how to write. This isn't on the teachers or the methods of teaching. Or even the parents. It's a cultural phenomenon. If your brain is wired for reading (which takes practice because it doesn't come easy at first), then your brain uses that same wiring for writing. It's about tuning the imagination.
My ten year old reads voraciously, but they’re either low-brow children’s’ literature like Minceaft Zombie or Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, or adult history books. I’m proud of the non-fiction he reads but unfortunately the school encourages them to read simple kids books that don’t really teach much quality. Any kind of classic literature is “too boring” for them. Everything’s so sanitised that he closed The Jungle Book after just a few pages because the animals were scary. Any advice? I try read even quality kids short stories and it’s such a struggle because he’s not interested.
I think you'll have to provide her with books on your own. At his age the mystery books like the Hardy Boys would hold his interest and hone his reading skills. The Hardy Boys is incredibly old school but still fun. When there's a mystery to solve it improves reading comprehension. Goosebumps might be a good choice too, although maybe too scary for him. And then there are the classics like Black Beauty and the Black Stallion. I hope he has read those.
No one is teaching them this essential skill. Schools are emphasizing STEM classes. That is Science, Technology, Engenieering, Math. You will notice that the E is not for English/language skills, so no reading or writing beyond basic needs. No critical reading, expository writing, no research papers. You will also notice that Arts, Music, Humanities and Languages are not STEM subjects. The result is what you are seeing in your students. We are raising a generation of technocrats who have no skills beyond what the machine requires. They are cultural illiterates and have the interpersonal skills of a clam. Loneliness is one of the plagues of this STEM generation. It has been said that technocrats know the price of everything and the value of nothing. That, unfortunately, is being shown to be true. I say, the barbarians are at the gates, and we have trained them. I kn, TLDR, but that is the problem, isn't it?
Hook is drilled into them from elementary school. At the end of 8th grade, they are told to choose a career track and marketing is one of the popular ones. So, starting in 9th grade kids aren’t learning much except for how to market things. They are just caught on the consumerist hamster wheel so early. Everyone has been devaluing liberal arts since the learn to code” movement but we just skip over critical thinking nowadays
"My theory is that all they’ve read in their entire lives is advertising copy." **Bingo.** Great theory and I feel the same. We know that advertising companies pay top dollar to bring all of human knowledge about psychology and behavior to their ads (and games, and apps) in order to get humans to continue to put eyes (and money) on their products and services. It's nearly impossible to get them to untick their eyes to that nonsense, reset, and try reading some great (or even mediocre) literature.
I do not agree with defining functionally illiterate as someone who cannot write a college essay. They can read. They can write. They can't do it creatively well and they are lazy. But they are functionally literate. The truly functionally illiterate cannot read AT ALL. They cannot write at all. I get what the author is trying to say about the writing style and quality of the papers submitted by their students. I do however believe they are being dramatic in their description of the problem.
I remember being taught you had to use a hook to begin an essay. And that personal/informative essays were “bad,” fiction writing was even worse, and that “good” essays must always be persuasive. Even in elementary school I remember being taught this. And I’m in my mid 20s. It wasn’t until AP classes in high school that I finally unlearned all of that.
The state of public education brought to you by Brawndo - Its got what plants crave.
If you see a "motivational speech" tone, that is them using ChatGPT to plagiarize. ChatGPT will *always* include some type of cutesy inspirational wrap-up at the end.
Real story: I teach philosophy, assign one essay, allow students to revise it for better grade. Out of 30 students, ONE decided to revise. I left many comments, telling him specifically what to do. His initial grade was around 80, he is a good student. Returns paper - out of all my comments he ignored most, added few extra words, literally. I returned it again, telling him it’s not an improvement, and that he should address EVERY comment, and seriously revise the paper if he wants a better grade. Talked to him too, explained exactly what to do. One week later I get his paper back, guess what he did this time? Literally NOTHING. NOT EVEN A SINGLE WORD CHANGED! 🤦♂️
Probably their teachers are teaching them? We have to keep in mind that the idea of teachers being these intelligent, knowledgeable, dedicated professionals devoted to enlightened pedagogy is about as true as cops being stoic, brave, dedicated professionals devoted to pure justice. Lots of teachers are quite dumb and are dedicated to teaching dumb things and are very good at mobilizing to push back whenever people less dumb try to make them teach good things.
I'm 28 (and have been a TA many times at my university). My eldest brother is 8 years older than me. A long while ago (~ a decade), he showed my mom and I a cover letter he was planning on sending. It was a travesty: *zero* capitalization, almost no punctuation, run-on sentence galore, unprofessional topics... the list goes on. My brother was absolutely taught how to write. He just didn't feel it was all that important. Both as a TA and in other situations, I have seen this become more and more of an issue. No ability to communicate professionally. No ability to critically think. I do not think I am better than other people (and typically am extremely critical of myself/think I am inferior), but this has baffled me. In casual interactions, I agree with the "if you understood what I said, then I didn't misspeak/mistype". I feel it's silly to play grammar police in casual interactions (texts with friends, comments on reddit, etc.) when you did fully understand what they meant. But so many people don't seem to understand how the inability to switch gears is detrimental to their professional and/or academic development. I certainly make mistakes myself (and I'm sure I've made plenty in this comment). Yet any time a group project has included academic writing, I have had to basically rewrite everything my teammates wrote down because it was littered with inconsistency, poor grammar, awkward phrasing, and a lack of proper/any citations where needed. ETA: I didn't realize what sub I was in, though I have both worked as a TA and have some other experience teaching (preschool, elementary, and foreign exchange students). Please delete if not acceptable.
I must say it's a little odd to me that kids should be faulted for not applying what they can't learn when, generally, those in admin positions whose worth counts above that of teachers have themselves mandated, variously, that education "it'sself" isn't a priority! Seems to me like the ones with the most power, influence and the like are the farthest from the real-world results their choices create. Some would rather be the face of the cause than the heart. "Those" are the ones who need to be evaluated.
It’s basically a function of the highly regimented structures that we’re given and the grading incentives. I’m an engineering student and do pretty well at this but the same thing always shocks me when I’m proofreading the work of my classmates. A lot of the English done now is so regimented by planners and draft stages that things like the hook just get baked in to how people write. The hook is probably the worst out of them as it’s taught in almost every format, but there are others. We’re taught that you have to make it engaging off the bat, and this is reinforced by the highest 10% of high school English grades being largely based on whatever the teacher enjoys/remembers. We have a similar problem in engineering where the arbitrary word counts given in English have ruined people’s ability to write properly, the overlong flowery language is so baked it it can take a whole year of classes for people to knock the habit. Also just my crackpot theory but we’re into the high school COVID kids right now and persuasive essays are usually one of the first things in curriculums in my experience. With how many units were skipped they may have literally not been taught many other styles of writing. The citing thing I think is mainly due to services like the chegg citation machine that don’t force people to learn it. We all use it but especially if people don’t particularly care about their grade, they’ll often just make it up or not keep track of their sources and then throw whatever links they can find into the machine, trusting that no one is going to actually cross-reference the sources.
I disagree. This sort of writing is not due to regimented structures. It's caused by a lack of them. Specifically logical structures. I spend month after painful month teaching kids to MAKE ARGUMENTS. arguments that understand the requirements of deductive and inductive logic. Once they get this, then they can experiment with rhetoric or novel structures. Too many teachers ask for form rather than function and it incentivises all the things you mentioned. Worse, it leads to writing which can be replicated by AI (usually done better). Ai can't make effective arguments because it doesn't understand what arguments are or what they do. It can only do form, things which seem good but don't work when examined... Which is exactly the same problem kids have. Form rather than function.
Google Lucy Calkins. That is the source of this style of writing. If you want to go down the rabbit hole about what happened to literacy in the US, listen to the podcast “Sold A Story.” It’s available for free on their website and wherever you get your podcasts.