Comment by nluken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nluken | Hacker News Reader

Essays might not be the best way to assess reading and writing skill, but this article's reasoning leaves a lot to be desired. The author seems to value an essay insofar as it demonstrates reading comprehension, and not as a vehicle for teaching writing skill. Students need to understand what they are reading to write an essay, but the writing itself is another skill entirely that the author here doesn't seem to address. I read a lot of my peers' works in college and came to the conclusion we need to encourage more writing skill, not less.

> Students get more points for good typing and clear sentence structure than they did for actually thinking deeply, questioning the status quo or changing their minds.

I hear this all the time from engineering types. Writing well means finding a clear, compelling way to communicate your ideas. Sure, we should try to avoid hiding bullshit behind a façade of flowery prose, but a great idea communicated poorly is useless.

> If you grew up in a household with verbally agile family members, you probably did way better on essays than your peers, but not due to much effort on your own.

And? If you grew up in a household with engineers, you probably did better at math. I don't get how this affects any one given assignment type over another.

I think it's even worse--the value of learning writing is that it means learning to think clearly.

The only reliable way to write clearly is to think clearly. For complicated topics, writing and thinking go hand in hand. Most people simply can't keep large subjects in their head, at least, not at first, not without tons of extra time and effort. If you are trying to write a paper and you have gaps in your understanding of the topic, you'll discover those gaps in the writing and fix the gaps in your understanding. If you make a guess that seems intuitively right and write it down, the lack of justification will stare you straight back in the face.

I think writing essays about Jazz in 10th grade social studies classes helped my career as a software engineer.

As an author, I agree with what you are saying 100%. But I'm not sure that you are disagreeing with the OP. His point--as I understand it--is that you don't get better marks for writing an essay about Jazz that is clear, complete enough not to have gaps, and deep enough to display comprehension versus writing something that is digestible and flows.

In other words, you are being graded on the superficial form of the essay, not the depth and completeness of your thinking. You may have chosen to close the gaps and dig beneath the surface, buta s he says, the system strongly discourages teachers from grading you on your thinking.

Unless the essay was in a music course, how could a teacher know enough about the subject matter to grade you well, except by happy accident that they are also a Jazz afficionado? If an essay asks every student to write about their favourite hobby, which teacher can grade all the essays at that level?

I agree that one of the great values of writing is to force you to think a thing through, but my read of TFA is that unless you are holding yourself to that standard, you need a reader who will hold you to that standard, and a high school teacher is statistically unlikely to be that reader. And therefore, assigning essays in high school for the most part does not help students.

Those students who hold themselves to a higher standard than trying to efficiently acquire high marks will benefit, but the rest will not.

I made no indication I was disagreeing with OP. I would like to reply to your points and elaborate.

I think your standards for high school writing are too high. "Clear, complete" sounds more like graduate-level work. Try reading papers from an undergraduate writing class sometime--the basic expectation is that students present a clear thesis with arguments that support it. The thesis itself can be wrong, reflect a facile understanding of the topic, have well-known rebuttals, etc.

High-school writing is graded superficially for good and bad reasons. Let's get bad reasons out of the way first--teachers are overworked and underpaid, and don't have enough time to do a better job because they are busy with administrative bullshit or standardized tests. There are good reasons--superficial problems often reflect a lack of understanding for how ideas connect to one another.

The correct use of paragraphs means understanding whether sentences express related ideas. If you can't tell if two ideas are related, you can't make paragraphs. Coordinating conjuctions like "and" or "but" have the same grammatical function but express different relationships between the clauses. Students use the wrong one, and it's often because they haven't thought about whether two ideas contrast with each other. Spot the "superficial" problems and you find markers for problems with the underlying ideas.

If you don't assign essays to high school students, you're lowering the bar across the board, and I think we would end up with a crisis in graduate schools. High school is not just a fact / skill dump for various bits of subject matter like history and mathematics or whatever you want to include in the curriculum. It's also a place where people develop some of their critical thinking skills. Writing bad essays is a step along that path.

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