Dear Furuness,

As a high school English teacher, I want to make sure my students
are prepared for college classes, especially their first-year writing course.
You teach a lot of those courses, right? So maybe you can tell me what college
professors expect incoming students to know or be to able to do?  

Clangers by Lettuce | Flickr Creative Commons

First of all, let me say
thank you. Thank you for working so hard and so well. I teach four courses a
semester, all of them writing-intensive, and at least once a month I feel so
overwhelmed that I want to crawl to the nearest dark corner and have a good
cry.

Meanwhile, you are teaching
something like six classes. I work with seventy-some students; you have more
like a hundred and twenty. Forget grading their essays; how do you even learn
that many names? Oh, and I haven’t even mentioned the joys of classroom
management and dealing with parents and all the high school drama—

I’ll stop there. I don’t
want make you crawl to your corner. I’ll just say this: Every time I hear a
college professor say, What are they
teaching them in high school? I want to say, You try it, asswipe. You
wouldn’t make it to the end of the first day.

So it is with the utmost
respect and admiration that I must tell you: I think you’re asking the wrong
question.

Because there is no answer.

College professors can’t
form a consensus about … well, anything. Ask three professors a question,
and you’ll get four opinions. And that’s if the professors all teach at the
same institution. Looking for a coherent set of expectations for student writing
that will hold true across colleges is like hunting for a unicorn drinking
butterbeer from the Holy Grail. 

But wait: I have a suggestion.

 

Instead of looking to
colleges to inform your practice, look to the “real world.” Teach your students
to write in forms that exist in the wild: Op/Eds, advice columns, fundraising
pitches, book reviews, etc. Through rhetorical analysis, your students can
discover the conventions and expectations of a given form. If they practice writing
to the expectations of different forms, they’ll engage in linguistic
cross-training, working all their writing muscles.

Then they can use those muscles to kill the
five-paragraph essay.

 

I’m not the first person to
say, Write in real-world forms! Smart
teachers have been talking about it forever. And yet, year after year, my
first-year students tell me that their high school is still all about the five-paragraph
essay. A form that does not exist in the real world. Because no one wants to
read it. Have you ever once, in your life, thought: I can’t wait to curl up in front of the fire with a nice five-paragraph
essay!

 

Me, neither.

If we all use forms that
exist in the real world, the five-paragraph essay will wither and die, and
there will be great rejoicing through the land. But mainly, students may come
to see writing as real and relevant—and for that, their college professors will
rejoice.