Why I despise the 5-paragraph essay
A teacher's lament
The KidsLearn Substack is written by Suki Wessling, known as “Prof.” Suki to her students. Scroll to the bottom for links to Suki’s work and more information.
The 5-paragraph essay is a very specific type of torture applied to every late elementary and middle school… English teacher! Bet you thought I was going to say ‘student’ there. Oh, the students are tortured enough, but I’m guessing the 5-paragraph essay doesn’t constitute an outstanding mode of torture for them. At least it has clear rules, which is not true of so many of the trials of their school years.
But let’s face it, teachers are the true victims of the ubiquitous torture we call the 5-paragraph essay. We’re told to teach students how to write it, and then—in a horror not surpassed by standing in line at the DMV without an appointment—we have to read and grade them.
No one ever read and enjoyed a 5-paragraph essay.
This is a true statement of 100% validity and I dare you to try to refute it. Go on, go find someone whose perspective was changed, who was inspired by, who learned anything from the standard public school 5-paragraph essay. OK, I’m raising the stakes here: I double-dare you.
Right now you’re looking at your dwindling coffee, thinking, Wait, wasn’t there that one student…? And I am here to say, No, there was never that one student. The 5-paragraph essay was devised to crush students’ souls.
How can an assignment crush a soul?
The 5-paragraph essay has nothing to do with writing. Writing is communication. The specific purpose of writing is to draw humans together when they are not in the same place or time. When I read Plato, I am drawn in communion with him and his ideas. We are separated by thousands of years, 7000 miles, and our divergent beliefs in the role of women in society, yet I am privy to a piece of his brain, his life force.
Writing is communication. I am writing to you, sitting on my couch in California with a cat on my knees. His name is Wally and he is about to turn one year old. We call him Wally Silberman-Katz because of his silver muzzle and because all of our cats have Jewish names. This is a thing that you now know because this is not a 5-paragraph essay, in which random little tidbits that draw us together as humans are outlawed.
Off topic!
Not relevant!
This essay has nothing to do with Jewish cats!
You had way too much fun writing this essay, and fun is not allowed!1
The 5-paragraph essay is ‘work,’ not learning
When I started homeschooling my children, I still believed in the idea that traditional modes of teaching and learning were inevitable. I believed that schools are organized the way they are for a purpose, and that the purpose was that their organization promoted better learning. I was wrong.
When I fell down the rabbit hole of homeschooling, I fell hard and fast. And I enjoyed it, because one of my all-time favorite books is Alice in Wonderland. In that tale, Alice finds out that the world she has taken for inevitable, real, and the only world that exists is simply another part of a fiction that is reality.
We define reality as that which is real before our eyes. But what is real changes as soon as we shift our field of vision. What homeschooling taught me is that schools exist to document work, and that work doesn’t necessarily lead to learning.
The 5-paragraph essay is work. Real writing is learning.
What is real writing?
Help students learn to write their souls. When they do, the initial products will be messy. They will be irreverent and irrelevant. They will have a profound lack of organization. But then in the process of revision, they’ll learn how to organize, clarify, and hone their ideas. Learning to write from the soul will teach students everything they’ll learn from writing the 5-paragraph essay except for one pointless lesson: how to write 5 paragraphs that no one will ever want to read.
Write from the soul!
The lesson young writers won’t learn:
How to produce boring, stuffy, inconsequential writing.
The lessons young writers will learn:
They’ll learn that their ideas are important, and if they work hard enough, they can use writing to transmit their ideas and passions. Even over thousands of miles. Even over thousands of years. Once they learn to write well, their thoughts will come to life in another brain.
Magic!
These are all valid complaints. Yet, you’re still reading. Why are you reading? So far, I haven’t given you a single clear topic sentence. I have not supported by topic sentences with three pieces of verifiable information. (I may have made up Wally for all you know, yet I promise that I took that photo of him while writing this post.)
So true! I always thought it was so awful for the kids, but never considered how hard it must be for teachers also!