How to Write Timed Essays That aren't Crap

categories: Standardized Tests, Teachers Ideas and Resources

Published April 27, 2009 @ 11:28AM PT

the five paragraph essay

For the record, I despise the timed essay tests students have to write for such high-stakes tests as the AP English exams and the SAT, but like death, taxes, and acne, they're a fact of life for teachers and students.

The worst thing about the tests is that they promote the opposite of writing, since they tempt teachers and tutors to train students in such abominations as the five-paragraph essay. You know, upside-down triangle intro (trite generalization narrowing down to cookie-cutter thesis sentence), followed by three body paragraphs (three rectangles, each with topic sentence first, supporting examples after, then conclusion and transition), and then wiped clean with a snorer of a right-side-up triangular conclusion ("restate your thesis, then generalize out to close").

"Then flush," we should all add, if honest.

Because that kind of writing is crap. Nowhere does it exist except in classrooms, AP exams, and SATs. Most horribly, students get the idea that this mechanical form is good essay writing generally, even for take-home papers. To me, it's the job of the high school teacher to unteach the mechanical form, and grow students into the organic approach.

Better still is the challenge of teaching students to write organically on those damned timed essays themselves. Anybody who thinks a mechanical five-paragraph essay is going to stand out in a two-foot stack of five-paragraph essays on an AP or SAT scorer's desk, and gain the highest marks, should go to rehab and dry up. Or maybe read real essays beyond school.

So let me share with you a way to teach writing that was never possible before about two years ago - a way that allows the students to literally watch and hear their teacher read an AP Exam prompt, read the exam poem cold, and then write the exam. All under test conditions, within the 40 minute time limit. (The same thing could be done with history or other subjects - anything with an essay prompt.)

All it takes to do this is a computer microphone and an internet connection to such free screencast sites as screencast-o-matic.com.

Here's the first fifteen minutes of a lesson I gave to my AP Lit students last year. Since AP exams are coming up soon, it might come in handy for some classrooms or, better still, prompt teachers to make their own. Students need teachers to put themselves out there as writers, instead of adults who only talk about how writers should write.

From an old post, the background:

A few days ago, I had my AP Literature students do a timed writing of an old AP Lit essay question under exam conditions – 40 minutes to read a challenging poem and write an essay that could make or break their opportunity to get college credit for our course.

Many students had a hard time with it. Many didn’t manage to write more than half a page, hand-written – two small paragraphs – for the assignment. (The poetry essays are apparently always what they do worst on in the real AP exam, which is why we’re starting the year with six weeks of poetry.) So I did the assignment myself, with headphones and mic on, talking through each stage of my own approach to taking timed essay exams on poetry.

Here’s how it looks (but you really should take a glimpse at the AP Lit channel on Screencast-o-matic itself, because it allows comments, time-stamped notes, downloads, and more. It’s a great tool.)

(Click here for a larger, clearer version. It's a beautiful poem, by the way.)

Part 1: Attacking the question, annotating the poem:

Here are the second and third parts, in which students get inside this writer's head as he talks through and composes his essay. They hear the thoughts, they see the sentences form, all in real time. (Don't tell me technology can't improve instruction.)

Note the student feedback under part three. They suggest, among other things, that filming the process being hand-written instead of typed might be more effective. I may try that next fall. (Or I might decide they were at their whiniest adolescent worst and just need to suck it up.)

Finally, this isn't supposed to be entertainment. Asking students to sit quietly at home, listening to the teacher talking through his ideas as he reads the prompt and writes the essay for 40 minutes is asking a lot. But making them do it at least once, and reflect on what they learned about real, organic writing - and more importantly, about spending a full ten minutes or more thinking and annotating before beginning the essay at all - that's an investment most of my students said they thought paid off.

Image by Arthae

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Comments (8)

Great technique. I like that it demonstrates the struggle writers -- even teachers -- often face when confronting a blank page. I think many students believe that there's some secret, magical power possessed by writers, and that they probably don't have it themselves. Watching (and hearing) an expert slug through a writing assignment explodes that myth, and probably unloads some of that mental burden for students.

Posted by Cheryl vanTilburg on 04/27/2009 @ 04:34PM PT
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Thanks, Cheryl. You're spot on. My favorite moment when re-watching the first screencast was when I got stuck on a line in the poem and, clock ticking, just said: "I don't get that line at all. So I'm going to move on."

I got that line while watching, a year later. But like you say, I think it's good for students to see an "expert" - or a teacher, anyway, which let's hope is often the same thing - say, "I don't know get that, but it's okay."

The best thing about the "organic" approach - no outline, just start your essay after a long pre-write session, and follow your thinking as it unfolds - is that it saves students the waste of time so much of them spent on an outline.

Posted by Clay Burell on 04/28/2009 @ 02:33AM PT
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I strongly (very strongly) dispute the notion that we're doing wrong teaching kids five paragraph essay style; learning that form - and it did, indeed, have to be drilled into me - forced me to work harder to organize my thoughts coherently, back up my assertions, and not assume others understood my train of thought. I am immensely grateful to my high school teachers who pushed me to do it... and because of it, today, I write all sorts of essays without feeling bound to the form... but learning good form was key, I'm convinced, to my education as a writer.

I appreciate that my experience may not be the same for others (though I'd have to say, I feel like others I was in class with masered it faster than I did), but I think it's a disservice to suggest that basic gounding in essay form doesn't help develop better writers. They may not make for the best, most memorable essays; but that's not what training in "basics" is for.

I also appreciate that timed essay writing is hard, especially for those with test taking issues; however, I think two things are key - one is that, in an age of loose approaches to plagiarism and copying, timed, in room essays force people to provide examples of thier own voices as writers, and the ability to write under a pressured deadline is part of real life expectations. And again, basic grounding in good essay form can only, it seems to me, help in preparing for an essay exam; I was aces at essay tests in colllege, sailed thought the AP English exam (the SAT did not require timed writing when I took it). And again, I know that its all due to my grounding in good essay form.

I don't teach, and I can't begin to assume knwledge of what it is o take kids through basic wriing prep; but I know in my work for various companies, and from my Mom's experience as a university prof (as well as her colleagues and other friends), that writing, generally, is getting worse, and my mom was frustrated by the basic writing errors that increasingly showed up in student papers over time. Her university stopped giving their timed essay test while she was there... and while it didnt affect overall qulaity of writing, she pointed out that the lack of testing made it harder to spot problems earlier, and get kids the remedial help they might need.

I think the larger lesson here is that, probably, there's no one "right" answer here; we are individuals wiyth different ways of learning, different things we need to master. Still, I find myself, in middle age, being surprisingly old fashioned on language arts education - phonics, spelling tests, the five paragraph essay - and distrustful of so-called "modern" improvements. Would I have seen a benefit in watching another person compose an essay? Perhaps; but nothing, I think, can replace the most basic work of writing... which is doing it, a lot, with some expectaions as to structure and form. Wihout that... I don't think we're making much progress.

Posted by NYC Weboy on 04/28/2009 @ 05:46AM PT
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NYC, did you outline this response along the 5p-essay form?

A couple of quick notes: teaching paragraph unity and coherence should be done in middle school, if not earlier (I began learning it in fourth grade). The 5PE is one helpful way to do that. Once learned, though, it's too small a cage for a young adult. You can "unteach" it without saying, "Hey, go back to elementary incoherence."

It's a style and voice thing.

Your final paragraph seems to infer that I used this lesson to replace writing exercises; on the contrary, after viewing it, students spent six weeks writing their own responses (weekly or so). That was time for many of them to practice writing like something more that a mechanical middle schooler.

Context is everything. My students were highly literate and privileged. They'd long since mastered the basics of coherence. But it seems nobody had bothered to explain to them that writing is more than that.

Posted by Clay Burell on 04/28/2009 @ 09:07AM PT
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Ah, NYC, self-correction: you see the 5pe as an intermediate stage you'd outgrown, and clearly don't use it (or outline) now.

Your points about the benefits of timed writing are well-taken too, though most English teachers I know make it a point to give first-week writing prompts precisely to spot the students needing remedial help early.

The 5pe is like the raft in Buddha's parable: once a young writer has used it to cross the river and reach the far shore (of organization and coherence), it shouldn't be carried on the back. It should be left on the shore. It's done it's job.

Way too many high schoolers enter college still carrying that raft, and it makes their writing a desert. And many college profs I know lament that too.

But again, yes, true: coherence and organization are important. If they're not learned by age 12 or so, I'm gob-smacked. But if we keep teaching the 5pe throughout high school, we're bottom-feeding, and doing a disservice to students capable of more - of style, wit, figurative language, voice, uniqueness. They should be let to drop the raft and explore real writing.

Posted by Clay Burell on 04/28/2009 @ 09:21AM PT
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I am a physics teacher. I ran across this post and was intrigued. I have tried in the past a physics teaching technique that is similar. I give students a different book than my own and have them pick a problem from the chapter equivalent to chapter in the book that they are using. I have never seen the problem so they seem my process of approaching a new problem. I never thought of making video of that, thanks for the idea. My question is based on my experience with this method of problem solving.

Have you tried something similar with more average students. When I do this sort of exercise in my own class it really advances my students who already have reasonable amount of understanding, but it serves as a frustration and I think holds back my students who need more help. When an advanced student see me approach something to analyze they can compare how they would do it. They learn from the gap between how I approach it and they do.

My less advanced student frequently think I am doing magic or using some sort of black box. I even remember this as a student watching an English teacher pick apart a poem and thinking that they were just making all that stuff up. Have you usde this with students who are not there yet? If so what has made it helpful to them as well.

Thanks for a very thought provoking post.

Posted by Jim Peterson on 04/30/2009 @ 04:44AM PT
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Jim, the physics application you entertain is fascinating. If you do make such a thing, please get back to us here with a link. I'm a physics groupie without a lick of the mathematical knowledge to get into it, which I've regretted for a good two decades. I still love the conceptual, and envy physics teachers for having that content to teach (correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd think it's easier than poetry in terms of generating interest).

I ramble. I haven't tried this method with low achievers, but it's an interesting question.

The first response that comes to mind is that the film can be paused, backed up, reviewed, etc, at any student's pace, which is better than we can say for live lectures or demos.

The second is that students can write comments on the screencast-o-matic page asking for clarification, and both teacher and other students can respond. That's another way for more comprehensible input for all levels.

Thoughts?

(And have you ever played with Moodle, wikis, or other online forums for class discussions?)

Great comments, Jim.

Posted by Clay Burell on 04/30/2009 @ 05:43AM PT
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Love this posting. I only wish more teachers would go against convential techniques and strategies to give this a shot. The entire idea of screencasting is a built in proofread that will facilitate students actively evaluating their own work in a more efficient (time limited) manner.

Posted by Ken Shelton on 05/09/2009 @ 08:14PM PT
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Clay is an American high school Humanities teacher, technology coach, and Apple Distinguished Educator who has taught for the last eight years in Asian international schools. According to law, he's married to his wife. According to his wife, he's married to his Mac.