Killing the Five Paragraph Essay: A Book About Writing

I'm happy to have sitting on my desk a fresh new copy of John Warner's Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities officially out next week. For anyone who teaches writing, or who just wants to understand how we entered this golden age of bad writing instruction, and who also wants to know how to escape it.

Warner is a regular blogger for Inside Higher Education, and he turns up in a variety of other settings as well as having spent a couple of decades teaching writing on the college level. He knows the territory.

He's also heard the complaints about Kids These Days and how they can't write, and with the first few pages, he dispenses with the usual suspects (bunch of snowflakes with too many cell phones). So what's the answer?

The short answer is they write badly because we taught them to. The long answer takes up the first ten chapters of Warner's invaluable book.

We need to acknowledge first that we have always been complaining that students could not write, while also acknowledging that writing, unlike speaking, is a completely unnatural process that humans have to learn. Warner lays some important groundwork in talking about the writer's practice.

But the particularly valuable chapters are those that lay out the different influences that have created a perfect storm of bad writing instruction. Over those seven chapters, Warner helps clarify how these disparate yet interlocking forces brought us to this place. This sad, lumpy place.

Warner runs through seven problems. There's the problem of atmosphere, the way in which schools and a culture of pressure and competition can suck the fun out of learning. There is the problem of surveillance, the ways in which we monitor students closely, often choosing bad proxies in place of more authentic indicators (e.g. attention). The problem of assessment and standardization, the belief in the One Right Answer, which is the very opposite of good writing. The problem of education fads, like grit (here Warner includes a great breakdown of The Hype Cycle). The problem of technology hype-- no, the good writing assessment software that is always "almost here" still has not arrived. The problem of folklore, the received wisdom that is passed along with no evidence but age. And the problem of precarity, which speaks to the lack of stability in a teachers' life, including precarious pay and increasingly senseless and unpredictable means of evaluating the teachers' work.

You may not have thought of all of these as factors in the teaching of writing, but Warner makes a clear case for each. Then he talks about a better framework (my favorite chapter title here: "Making Writing Meaningful by Making Meaningful Writing") and wraps the book up with unanswered questions, those challenges that must be addressed.

This is a great book, clear and concise and accessible. It looks at the big picture of how we got to this place and how to get out of it, which is critical. Writing texts that focus simply on specific techniques and exercises invariably end up tinkering around the edges, because too many teachers are starting from a fundamentally flawed foundation. Not their fault-- it is a foundation that has been built and enforced by outside, non-teachery forces-- but before we can build a better structure, the foundation has to be addressed.

That is not to say that there aren't specific items from the "things you can use in your classroom next week" category, but the book is important for anyone who is interested in growing a world full of better writers, including people who aren't in the classroom. For more specific activities and exercises, I recommend Warner's The Writer's Practice, due in February of 2019.

This is a book we've needed for a while, and now that it's here I recommend you grab a copy.

ICYMI: Triptophan Hangover Edition (11/25)

Ready to just sit and spend some quiet time? Here's some worthwhile reading from the week. If it speaks to you, remember to share it, tweet it, or otherwise help push it out into the world. That's how voices get amplified.

Reading Too Soon

Need one more article explaining the science behind not teaching reading to littles? Here you go.

It's Time To End The Testing Culture In America's Schools

Robert Pondiscio ran this piece in the 74, so you might have missed it, but it's a pretty clear argument for chopping the Big Standardized Tests off at the knees.

DeVos Will Face House Dems on Five Ed Fronts

Politico tries to figure out which parts of the Democratic House will be making which kinds of attacks on which of the DeVosian policies.

Communications in a Modern World

Dad Gone Wild takes a look at how modern media have changed the rules for discussion, disagreement and debate.

The Teacher Life: Grading Papers Over Holiday Break   

Mercedes Schneider on one of those benefits that those damn only-work-part-of-a-year teachers enjoy.

Dear Lawmakers: Please Hire Real Teachers As Education Aides, Not TFA Alum  

Part of the purpose of Teach For America was always to create Reformsters who could claim teaching cred as a way to grease their passage into the halls of power (where they could advocate for reformster policies). It's working too well.

Rescuing Schools From Corporate Goliaths  

John Thompson reflects on some of the lessons of the last Network for Public Education conference.

Personalized Online Learning Fails  

Okay, I shortened the headline, but Nancy Bailey's piece ticks off the list of ways in which online learning does not serve students well and what they lose when they lose traditional classroom work.

Batch Processing Students On An Assembly Line  

Nancy Flanagan is wondering why we're back to complaining about factory model schooling again...

Charter Choice Closer Look  

A huge compendium of charter-choice related articles and items. Just in case this list didn't give you enough reading to do.

Navigating the Trivial in Writing Instruction  

Some big thoughts about the little things in writing instruction, from P. L. Thomas.

Toxic Philanthropy Part II  

Wrench in the Gears connects some more of the dots in the big-money fauxlanthropy game.

The Seven Most Powerful Words In Education

What can I do to help you?

These words are hugely powerful and tragically underused at every level of the education world.
In the classroom, teachers have been taught since the dawn of time that they should be clear about their expectations. This is excellent practice; let the student know exactly what you want from her. If she has trouble meeting that expectation, be certain that you are explaining the expectation clearly. And then ask the student, "What can I do to help you?"

It may well be that the student won't be able to tell you. That's okay. Just asking the question signals a shift in your classroom dynamic; instead of a setting in which the teacher demands performance from a student, who is on her own to produce the required signs of learning, the Seven Words reframe the classroom as a place where the teacher and student are teamed up to conquer learning obstacles together. Students benefit from knowing they aren't alone in the struggle, and teachers are reminded that students are their partners, not their obstacles (a view promoted from teacher accountability systems that say, "You have to get good scores out of your kids, or else.") It's worth noting that computerized personalized [sic] learning systems cannot ask this question in any meaningful way.

The Seven Words are also powerful for building administration. Sadly, may teachers have never, ever had a building principal ask the question. Instead they hear "Make your test numbers" or "Follow the proper procedures" or "Here's one more program I expect you to use in your class." There are plenty of expectations, but far too few building principals consider their job to include helping teachers meet those expectations. Some administrators pride themselves on an Open Door Policy ("Any teacher can come talk to me any time she wants") and some principals roam the building, popping into classrooms to see what's going on. But I'll bet there are few teachers in this country who have ever had a principal walk into their classroom, sit down, and say, "I just wanted to ask what I can do to help you with your work." Without something that explicit, some teachers will never believe it's okay for them to ask their boss for help with anything, ever.

The Seven Words would help at the policy level, too. We've been subjected to decades of school "reform," ongoing attempts to make schools better. And yet, as policy makers discuss various fixes and programs and policies, they rarely take the step of going to actual classroom teachers and asking, "What can we do to help you?" When teachers are allowed in the room at all, they are usually carefully handpicked teachers who will be friendly and agreeable.

Of course, the Seven Words are rarely used with teachers at the policy level because so many players at that level are there to sell something. They have decided on their own that No Child Left Behind or Common Core or Race to the Top or Competency Based Education or Any Amount of Ed Tech Whizbangery will fix things before they so much as look at an actual classroom teacher. But even after such policies are adopted, policy makers could say, "Okay, we've decided you're going to do this thing. What can we do to help you implement our idea successfully?" But even that escapes them. "Just expect real hard and throw some professional development at them. That should fix it." Even when things fail, few reformsters say, "Yeah, we really should have talked to teachers first." The diagnosis is invariably Bad Implementation or Insufficient PR or Not Enough Teacher Training.

The Seven Words have been all-too-often overlooked when imposing solutions on struggling schools. Charter operators and other school fix-em-up experts don't ask the question-- instead, they swoop in and announce, "We have decided what you folks need. Without talking to you. Because we're just that good, and you can't really be trusted to Know Things."

The failure of the Obama-Duncan School Improvement Grants and turnaround programs like New York's Renewal Schools all follow this same pattern. Top-down government officials declare, "This is what you're going to do to fix things." But nobody goes to the schools, sits down with teachers, and asks, "What can we do to help you?"

W. Edward Demmings believed that the answers to an organizations problems could be found closest to the place where the actual work was being done. The folks who have taken the reins of leadership in the education world would do well to remember his insight. But "What can I do to help you" doesn't just yield the most useful advice for helping schools; it breaks down the sense of isolation. Teachers are used to working in a solitary setting, and they're used to being ignored by people who make decisions that affect the classrooms where they do their actual work. Teachers are used to being over-extended jugglers who only see the bosses long enough for them to toss in one more ball (or cement block or running chain saw) and then run away.

We could improve the working conditions in schools and the morale of the teaching force, even as we uncovered some of the solutions to school improvement. It wouldn't be easy (for instance, some people would have to give up pet ideas that aren't actually helping anybody), but starting the process would be simple. We could do it with just seven words.

Originally posted at Forbes.

A Grateful Heart

It would be easy for me think that I Know Something.

My life is pretty good. And while there have been some rough patches, nothing bad has ever come into my life without my invitation. The bad patches in my life are my own damn fault, my own bad choices biting me in the rump.

So I could take credit for that. My professional success? My blinding teacher skills and professional acumen. My successful second marriage? I now know all the secrets of a good relationship. My lack of health problems? A well-lived healthy life style. Not being arrested, detained or physically abused by the authorities? I always behave according to the rules and do as I'm suppose to.

Americans (particularly white ones) are prone to a lack of gratitude which in turn hardens the heart and muffles empathy. Everything I have, the reasoning goes, I have because I earned it. I got what I deserve." From there it's not even half a step to looking at people who are having a hard time with the assumption that they, too, have gotten what they deserve. This is the world view at the steely heart of some conservatism-- some people are bad people who make bad decisions, and bleeding heart liberals are trying to thwart the natural order of things by protecting these people from the natural consequences of their poor choices. Welfare programs are about undoing the poverty that some lowlifes have earned, and if they don't suffer for their bad choices, how will they ever learn to do better. Birth control and abortion are about slutty women avoiding the consequences of their nasty sex-loving ways. If immigrants were meant to be American, they would have been born here-- why try to undo what nature has done? The business world grows out of the natural moral code of the universe, based on the fundamental truth that people should get what they deserve-- and no more.

This is especially a trap for teachers, whose job come grading time can feel a lot like deciding what students deserve. It's crazy making, and it tricks us into sitting in judgment of students as human beings, which is no place to be. My deal with myself was always that I would not try to judge what they deserved, but only assess what they had actually done. It was not my job to sit as judge and jury, making sure they got what they deserved.

Well, nobody gets what they deserve. Use every man after his desert, says Hamlet, and who would escape whipping? I don't deserve a tenth of what I have gotten, and continue to get out of life. And one really doesn't have to look hard in today's world to see that there is no apparent correlation between moral uprightness and the acquisition of money and power. But many of us keep assuming that if someone is rich, they must also be wise and good and deserving (and when they offer to fix education, we should listen to them).

And yes, there are people who don't get what they deserve-- to be treated with respect, to be free from abuse, to live without being beaten down for no reason. Do they still receive some measure of grace? It's not for me to judge that, but it is for to ask if I should be helping by delivering some of that grace myself.

Thanksgiving weirdly reminds us of this problem. We've come to understand that the old story, filled with moral clarity and historical ignorance, doesn't hold up. But what instead? The Pilgrims and Puritans were no saints, but neither were the native Americans, and the whole ugly mess of European colonial history in North America is a reminder that looking for clear-cut heroes in history is a fool's game. We all, to greater and lesser degrees, suck, and we have always sucked, and getting into arguments about who sucked the worst can be terribly time wasting. On Thanksgiving, I prefer to recommit myself to a simple set of propositions:

1) I have received, and continue to receive, far more than I deserve...
2) Therefor, I must owe someone-- the world, God, fellow humans, somebody-- a great deal
3) Therefor, I had better get to work paying off my debt.

We are all diners enjoying a meal we can't afford at an expensive restaurant. We should be committed to washing a ton of dishes.

Our motto should be "there but for the grace of God go I." We should be grateful for what we have, and that thankful heart should be filled with the impulse to help others, to watch out for the people around us, to take care of our fellow travelers as best we can before we finally run out of time. I don't deserve what I've been given, but I can't send it back-- all I can do is pass it on. I can harden myself into a bitter person who worries each day if I got what I wanted, and what was keeping me from it, or I can ask each day if I did enough, gave enough, to pay today's installment on my debt. My privileges come with an obligation to do for other people. Life's challenge, of course, is to figure out what that means in practical, day to day terms. That is where love comes in, but this is enough heavy lifting for a food-based holiday.

Give Books

I was just going to add this to the ICYMI list, but it's too cool not give extra attention.

Adam Gish, an English teacher at Garfield High School in Seattle, took a hundred students on a different sort of field trip. He loaded them up on two big yellow school buses and took them to a book store. Each student had a $50 gift card. They got a tour of the store and time to spend the money on whatever books they chose.

Students had to write an essay to qualify for the trip, a program that has been growing bit by bit since the days that Gish discovered some students had never been in a book store before.

This might be one of the most awesome things ever.

I still remember the Scholastic book fairs in elementary school, and the sheer power and excitement of holding an actual real book in my hands, buying it with my own money and taking it home to sit in a corner and read. I remember how those books smelled, how the new pages had that special resistance to being opened until the binding was gently eased loose by the reader working his way through. I bought some of the books aimed at students my age, but I loved getting the "real" books-- I still have my copies of the H G Wells novels I bought from Scholastic.

When I taught middle school, I tried using the book club fliers, but the hassle of being a middle man for thirteen year old customers was daunting, and it wasn't quite the same (though when I opened those boxes of books that came, and that old smell wafted out, I was excited all over again). And when the twins were born, we enrolled them in Dolly Parton's Imagination Library, one of the most awesome pieces of real philanthropy that a celebrity ever undertook (the library sends a book a month to every small child who's enrolled-- you can read about it here).

Sure, I buy tons of otherwise unavailable books on line. But there is nothing like actually being in a bookstore, seeing them all lined up or laid out and looking through them, peeking to see what cool stuff awaits.

It has been years and years since we had a new bookstore in my area; we now have a used bookstore that gets some new stuff, and that's better than nothing. It's about 75 minutes to the nearest Barnes and Noble.

But to be able to put some students on a bus and hand them a gift card for buying books-- that would be awesome. My first thought was that I'd love to chip in, but Gish has an apparently generous anonymous donor, and this has to be a more common thing. For instance, if teachers in LA aren't taking students to the Last Bookstore, that's a crime. Book store field trips should be a thing everywhere. I would love to hear about similar programs in your area, and if you don't know of one, then I think you should get together with some other folks and start one. We all should. If you're looking for a good community project to round out the holiday season-- not just the gift of books (though the Icelandic tradition of Christmas Eve book gifts is also way cool)-- but the gift of getting to shop for and pick out a book of one's own. That seems like an excellent idea.

Turning Down the Clock

Adjusting to retirement is a process, as is helping a pair of tiny humans grow up. I've been at it for 170 days now, and while I reported to you about an early phase, I feel like I'm navigating another piece of teacher brain that I wish I'd known about back when I was still working.

There are minor adjustments, of course. I actually use naughty words far more than I did while I was working, or than I will when the twins start imitating. And I need more jeans. A pair and a half were plenty back when I was working. Now they are taking a beating daily.

But the big one lately has been turning down the clock.

When I was teaching, the clock loomed large in my life. I may not have measured out my life in coffee spoons, but I did measure it out in two and three minute increments, with a loud ticking in the background at all times. If I hurry, I can get this done in the next two minutes, but there's no time to pause because exactly at the end of those two minutes there's another Have To Do waiting to pounce on me.

My life coaches

Mind you, I always knew this was going on to some extent. In the beginning of my career, I actually had to learn to hear the clock, always ticking. My student teaching co-op at Wiley Junior High, Joe McCormick, drilled into me to be "punchy quick" both as a way to cover ground and help manage a class (they can't disrupt you if they're too breathless from trying to keep up with you). And as it sank in just how much less time I had than I needed, I learned every year to squeeze a few more bits of work out of a few more bits of minutes.

I'm sure I eased up when my first children were born, but mostly by cutting the number of demands on my time and not by changing my relationship with that clock. For a few years, until my older kids were school age, I simply dropped out of all extra stuff, but I still lived by the clock.

As I spent more years in the classroom and learned how to squeak some education out of every spare second and myself, not unlike the business of seeing how tightly you can pull a banjo string before it snaps. I knew it was a thing I had to watch as a teacher, knew it by those moments in which I lost track of my real mission because some student wanted to ask a deeper question or probe for better understanding or just share something they thought was important while I knew that tick tock there was another part of the lesson we were scheduled to tick tock move on to and yet this student was creating a teachable moment and I was trying to calculate on the fly just tick tock how we could most quickly move past this because tick tock and oh my God this kid is still talking and doesn't she hear the clock DON'T YOU HEAR THE CLOCK!

And you know in that moment, when you see the students getting in the way and forget that they are the way that you need to take a breath and rebalance.

I thought I was working with a balance, but I was still trying to keep the string pulled tight. I was still listening to the clock.

I thought the transition to retirement would take care of the clock, particularly with the twins. Toddlers aren't really impressed by your schedule, and they don't hear the clock at all (joke at our house: "Sorry, we would have been on time but we had to walk from the house to the car.")

But we would walk to the library, and after a bit of playtime with the library toys, I would start getting antsy. We've picked out the books. You built a pile. Time to get going. We have to get loaded up and move on to the next thing, right now, because... well, I had no idea. I just still heard the clock. And I finally realized one of the reasons I'm so bad at small talk-- I hear the clock ticking and that voice inside saying, "Shouldn't we really be getting something done?" Tick tock.

I thought, for all those years, that I had a monkey on my back. A cute little monkey. I had no idea that I was carrying around King Freaking Kong all the time.

I'm telling you this as a way of encouraging those of you who are still doing the work to be sure to check yourself. The clock did not make me a bad teacher, and I think I did a good job of being present, of hearing my students, of letting their needs and their moments set the pace. That last decade, when new programs and testing and data-cult bosses ate away at my teaching time, I wrapped the clock in flannel and stuffed it in a desk drawer and started to slice content from my course rather than fighting to cram 180 45-minute days into 15- 40 minute days. My students got less content, but at least they didn't get it being thrown at them like baseballs from a rapid-fire pitching machine.

All I'm saying is, friends and colleagues, check your relationship with the clock. It's one of those compromised balances in teaching that must be constantly worked on, but if you're like me, you may not realize how tightly wound you are.

Every profession comes with its own built-in issues. I have medical folks and engineers in my family, and it's easy to see how those professions have accented parts of their personalities. Teaching has its own set of issues (including the effects of spending too little time with other grownups and uncontrollable urges to make unruly mobs of people line up properly), but the tyranny of the clock is one that can really sneak up on us if we're not careful. I don't know yet to what extent I'll shake it (let me tell you sometime about my seven part time jobs), but now that I'm done being surprised by it, perhaps I can unclench just a bit and enjoy some actual quiet uninterrupted by tick or tock.

Next Up: Zombie PARCC

If you aren't a regular reader of Campbell Brown's The 74 website, that's probably just as well. But this week there are two pieces there worth seeing.

One is this piece by Robert Pondiscio, one of the best yet in the genre of "we will now go ahead and agree with what public school defenders have been saying all along" writings that have become all the rage. It is an excellent argument against the Big Standardized Test, and it comes from reform-ville. Go ahead and read it.

But even as Pondiscio is joining the chorus of test deniers, the 74 is also running a piece by Brendan Lowe entitled "Primed for Amazon-Style Question Shopping, New Meridian Opens Fresh Chapter for Maligned Common Core Test."

Uh-oh.

First the good news. PARCC is just about down to two members. But if you thought it was just going to quietly take a deserved spot on the trash heap of history, well, meet Arthur VanderVeen. VanderVeen has been around. In the late nineties he founded a company to develop digital curriculum, but it failed. He was an executive director of College Board and sold the SAT as a way to meet federal high school assessment requirements under NCLB. He worked in NYC schools, starting under Joel Klein overseeing assessment, then bumped up to Chief of Innovation, where he founded the NYC iZone program focused on ed tech and personalized [sic] learning. Then he was the vice-president of business strategy and development for Compass Learning (which was eaten up by Edgenuity a few months after he left). He's exactly the kind of guy whose LinkedIn profile sounds like this:

Highly effective leader who integrates strategy, talent management, and disciplined execution to create successful, sustainable, and profitable enterprises. 20 years of leadership experience in business development, strategic partnerships, and product management in K-12 education. Expert in assessment management and personalized learning technologies. Has focused his career on fostering strategic public-private partnerships that deliver innovative products and services to K-12 schools.

After leaving Compass, VanderVeen became president and CEO at New Meridian, a company that hypes its ability to "to produce highly flexible assessments that accurately measure the skills that matter most." They look to collaborate with districts or states, or help states and districts that want to collaborate with each other. Their executive team includes three former Pearson execs and two College Board vets. The Gates and Hewlett foundations are among the financial backers.

That sounds like a lot of test items. If only there were a way to find a whole mountain of items that was lying around unused because the parent company that created it was tanking.

VanderVeen is the founding CEO of New Meridian, a nonprofit he created with other assessment industry veterans to make a run at acquiring the rights to PARCC’s question bank. VanderVeen’s team prevailed in April 2017, and now New Meridian is moving to adapt PARCC to an environment where multi-state consortia are going the way of the dinosaurs.

VanderVeen's vision is an Amazon of testing items, a giant catalog through which zombie-PARCC can be chopped up and sold off-- repeatedly-- for parts. This strikes me as a challenging for a couple of reasons. One is that PARCC's test bank has never exactly won rave reviews; there's a reason that many states dropped the thing and it's not just because it was expensive and Common Core became a toxic brand. The other is that creating a test isn't just a matter of writing the items-- the mix of items is also critical. In zombie terms, you can't build an effective zombie out of six heads and no legs.

Still, some states that have gone it alone have been a mess. Tennessee's attempt was a technical nightmare. And Florida (state motto: there's nothing about education we can't screw up) had its own series of do-it-yourself disasters. Why will this be better? Because VanderVeen is a more gifted salesman. As he explains it:

They never had to operate in the discipline of being customer-centric and really deliver value and ask questions. Is a 14-hour test too long? Might states balk at that? Is the cost too high? Are the constraints of working with a single vendor just not going to be acceptable to states? They didn’t have to think about that until they did. In an open market, states, or customers, have choices, and states made choices, and they walked away.

In other words, they spent too much time thinking about the educational implications of the test instead of managing a product for the marketplace.

Will this be a hard sell? Apparently not, because so far eight states, DC, and two other "entities" have signed up for this ( IL, MD, NJ, NM, MA, RI, LA, CO).

But wait, you say. The PARCC was launched with a big pile of taxpayer money. If it folds, don't taxpayers deserve a refund? Read carefully and you'll see that New Meridian won the right to be "the exclusive agent authorized to license test content owned by CCSSO and jointly developed by the former PARCC states." So PARCC is a true zombie-- not actually dead, but with its corpse animated by some force other than its own life.

Of course, the zombie solution may be great for people looking for an easy escape from PARCC, but it will require an elevated level of attentiveness from PARCC opponents. As Lowe reports, Phil Murphy won the New Jersey governor's seat in part by promising to get rid of PARCC, but as his Department of Education looked to replace PARCC, they hired-- you guessed it-- New Meridian to do the job. So New Jersey will replace PARCC with zombie PARCC.

So there it is. Even as folks on the reformy team speak out against the BS Tests, the fact remains that they are just too much of an asset to go away quietly. If you leave a pile of millions of dollars lying around, even if it is soaked in pig urine, somebody will be unable to resist the urge to pick it up.