Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The 5 Paragraph Essay
I found the articles to be very interesting and very much an awakening to the responsibilities and the thought that is going to have to go into my future English class. The five paragraph essay was always taught at my high school and I learned how to perfect the formula without really ever putting any critical thought and work into the essay. After reading some of the articles on this subject I realized that I myself was forced into the limitations of the five paragraph essay because that is what I knew and what was expected from me by my teachers. Now looking at how I will guide my students to write I realize that if I want them to be able to express their thoughts and think critically then I will have to move outside of the five paragraph essay. By gaining ideas from some of the articles, I hope to give my students the freedom to be able to choose the amount of paragraphs and the style of the essay. But I still think that their needs to be structure and a way to be able to assess my students so that I can grade them fairly with their classmates. I agree with the article by Noskin that expresses how important the prewriting process is and how teachers should not limit this to 20 minutes inside of the classroom. For students to fully form ideas and be able to think critically about a given topic I feel that they need a more open amount of time or space. I also agree with setting up both open ended and close ended writing prompts so that students of all writing and thinking styles can find a topic that intersts them. Overall, I know that my opinion on the five paragraphy essay will change whenever I have control over my own classroom, but for now I feel that it is neccessary to have structure and guide lines when teaching writing but there needs to be more room for creativity and critical thinking.
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The five-paragraph essay is something that is all too familiar to me. I remember learning the make up of the five paragraph essay before I ever entered junior high. I can see where it may be a useful instrument in giving students a basis and structure for the expansion of their ideas. I mean sure a student can say, "I think that World War II was devestating." What is important is the student learn that in an essay more information is needed such as, what devestating events happened, who caused them, what was done in response, etc. As students get older I believe it is necesarry for teachers to encourage and foster personal styles rather than to shun the students and make remarks like, "That is reserved for professionals. Are you a professional writer? How many books have you had published?" That was my experience with some teachers. I would try to break away from the norm with my writing and instead of being encouraged i was rebuked for it. One example in particular was when I was in third grade. I believe it was the first time essays had been introduced to my class. The topic was, "How to kill a porcupine." Most students wrote they would hit it with a hammer, then run it over with a truck, and then if that did not work use a shotgun to shoot it. I took the assignment a totally different way. I turned in a story about a dog that tried to kill a porcupine and failed. Then the story went on to tell what he did afterwards. Instead of just telling me that I should have stayed more on task the teacher became very upset with me and made me feel like my work was garbage. Perhaps if he wasn't so worried about everyone turning in uniform papers I would have became comfortable with my own writing style sooner. Basically, yes it is a trusty old tool this five-paragraph essay, but once it has served its purpose we need to encourage students to quit always using it.
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