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Harriet Gilbert hosts monthly interviews with contemporary authors that feature questions from both a live audience and BBC World Service listeners from all over the world. Recent programs have featured writers such as Nawal El Sadaawi, David Guterson, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, Alice Walker, Annie Proulx, and Chinua Achebe. Highly recommended! As always, you can go directly to the BBC site, but the best way to ensure that you don’t miss a program is to subscribe via iTunes. All of my Gr. 11—>Gr. 12 students in English A1, and all Gr. 10—>Gr. 11 students going into English A1 are invited to work on their writing this summer through email tutorials. Just send me a paragraph as an email attachment. I will mark it up with comments and suggestions and send it back to you. You can then rewrite and repeat the process as often as you like either with the same paragraph or a new one. Current English A1 students may not, of course, use actual paragraphs from one of your World Literature assignments. My email address, in case you’ve lost it, is ericmacknight AT mac DOT com. Best wishes, etm is that whereas I thought at first it would be an unending avalanche of trivia and nonsense, instead it is an unending avalanche of useful and interesting links and ideas. The trick is, I only follow people whose tweets relate either to education or to China or and have real value. Result? More unpaid professional development and Middle Kingdom enlightenment than I can possibly handle. Today I was too busy to follow my Twitter feed, and this evening when I tried to read all the tweets I had missed I quickly realized it was hopeless, and gave up. That’s OK—there’s lots more coming. The usual attacks on ye olde 5-paragraph essay are a bit like attacks on the sonnet. Are formal constraints really the problem? After all, the vast majority of sonnets ever written—the ones that have mercifully made their way into Time’s recycling bin—were undoubtedly very bad pieces of writing. Instead of criticizing the 5-paragraph essay, shouldn’t we give our attention to the writers’ and teachers’ lack of imagination and art? Even if we consider the 5-paragraph essay as a ‘mere exercise’, is that so bad? Musicians practice scales and chord changes. Cooks begin by following recipes. The 5-paragraph essay similarly teaches fundamental elements of good writing: beginning, middle, and end; stating a thesis; catching the reader’s interest; organizing one’s ideas; developing them with examples, illustrations, and explanation; constructing a coherent argument; concluding in a way that is both artful and interesting. Along the way, the student practices choosing the right word, crafting an effective sentence, employing rhythm and variety, and so on. At a certain point in European intellectual history Aristotle became the whipping boy for the new philosophers, who for the most part had never read Aristotle but only the medieval Scholastic distortions of Aristotle. In the same way, I suspect that most attacks on the 5-paragraph essay are misdirected. The real problem is not five paragraphs, but bad teaching. For students (of all ages): If you are looking for a model to emulate and teach you how to write well, Paul Graham’s work may be just what you want. His essays are less formal than some of the essays you are asked to write in school, but not by much. And his sense of economy, of rhythm, of structure, along with his clear prose, embody the qualities of good writing that we all aspire to. And of course, he often has very interesting things to say. Here are some of his essays that you might like, and learn from. In the first place, you have to buy the goddam cigarettes, And in the second place, The only good thing about smoking is, The problem is, you might not die an early death. It just goes to show how stupid a guy can be –Eric MacKnight BBC Radio’s Melvyn Bragg explores history and especially the history of ideas every week in a breathless 42-minute romp through a huge range of topics. Gathering academic experts around him, he delivers a weekly mini-course on subjects such as the trial of Charles I, the Augustan Age, St. Paul, Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’, the Boxer Rebellion, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, and so on, to take just a few recent examples. Science, politics, literature, art, and philosophy are all included. ‘In Our Time’ is ideal for teachers and students of those subjects, and teachers of I.B. Theory of Knowledge (TOK) will also find it useful. The speed and (for some) the British accents will make comprehension challenging, so for these podcasts even more than most, it’s far better to download episodes and then distribute them to students, who can then listen at their own pace, re-listen, etc. You can download recent programs from the BBC web site, but older programs are available only for streaming, so if you want your students to be able to listen on their computers or mp3 players, it’s best to subscribe via iTunes. The assumption of sole authorship underlies writing assessments in school, but in reality good writing almost always results from collaboration. This post by American free-lance writer Dan Baum— —makes me wonder about how we teach writing in schools. Baum’s post is a response to criticism he received after revealing that his wife, Margaret Knox, is also his editor. But he got my attention with his remarks on the important role of editing:
And yet in school, most of the time, a student whose work is edited by someone else is regarded as . . . a cheater! I know: the teacher is the editor; there’s peer-editing; etc. But I’m not sure any of that adds up to an adequate defense. It appears that the need to assess is in direct conflict with the best practices of good writers. Let’s look, for example, at the declaration that all IB students sign when submitting work for external assessment:
Is that a standard that professional writers collaborating with editors could meet? I doubt it. Now let’s look at a piece by Paul Graham, one of the best essayists I know. It’s called “Why Nerds are Unpopular”, and at the end of it we find this:
When we read Graham’s essay, we accept it as his work, and understand that he had help thinking it through and revising it. But if he were a student and handed in the same essay with the same notice of thanks appended, how many teachers would refuse to give him credit on the grounds that we can’t tell which bits are his, and his alone, and which bits came from Sarah, Trevor, Robert, Eric, and/or Jackie? A lot, I would think. And that disconnect between the way we teach and assess writing in school, on the one hand, and how real writers work, on the other, seems to me highly troubling. See my post on the SSIS Garden Project blog, SSIS Garden, R.I.P.? At a U.S. high school a couple of teachers discovered by accident that students do better when the usual procedures are reversed: Hat tip to someone in my Twitter stream—lost the tweet, but thanks, whoever you are. |
I have been teaching English since 1980 in public, independent, and international schools in the United States, Morocco, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, The Netherlands, and—since August 2004—in Suzhou, China.
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