My Toilet, an Essay

Dear Language Arts Teachers and Educators Everywhere,

 

Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time on the toilet. Not because, I’m using it, but rather because I consider it, a throne of thinking. I’ll pull the toilet cover down, and I’ll rest my feet on the tub, my laptop perched on my lap, and stare at the blank screen. And then I’ll think, because my desk is the desk of doing, and my toilet is the toilet of thought. Yet, on this very throne, I give you my thought. And as the music from my room is but a quiet murmur, still enough to hear the words though, I give you my opinion on writing assignments, and why writing should never be put in a category, and why we students, should be able to write freely.

 

In Seventh Grade we did a very large unit on Short Stories. Don’t get me wrong, I love to write, in fact I spend most of my free time writing. But staring at a rubric for a short story I had yet to write, I came across a few conclusions. First off, I am incapable of writing a short story. Every character needs a backstory, every action a reason. Life is not a collection of short stories completely unrelated, and therefore, I find it nearly impossible to just pick a memory and scribble it down in 4 pages. I feel like I cannot just write a story as to why Sally is picking an apple. You must know why she was in the park, why the apple tree was planted, Sally’s exact height (when she’s standing flat on her feet of course) and the height of the apple so you can know how high she had to jump to pick it, and that she was picking it for her Mother, why her Mother couldn’t pick it herself, and the view of the poor grass getting trampled by Sally’s repetitive jumps. And that is just one small detail that needs to be explained a million times over. Because the description of Sally getting an apple has no plot and no lesson learned, it’s just that, a description. And yet me telling you about retrieving a simple Apple has now completely taken up my whole short story.  Second, that putting a limit on the amount I can write, is like putting a limit on the brain. It’s cruel and  impossible. And third off, any “short story” I ended up writing had a lot of dead ends, and was a lot longer than 4 pages. There have been many successful short stories, and I look upon them with envy, but at the same time with realization that I can never hope to do such a thing. But making me write multiple short stories would be like forcing me to play a sport I detest. It’s alright to talk about it, I’m fine if you make me try it, play it once or twice until I know enough about it, but to force me to play that sport for 5 months straight, doing nothing else but that sport? Now that’s torture.

 

Now, this is the real surprise, I hate persuasive or argumentative essays. If I get one more standardized test that asks me to argue if I should have to bring my Mother to the Mall or not, I will refuse to write it. Because my writing ability can not be properly gauged based on such an insignificant fact. Writing will never be able to be gauged, so when  teachers and Standardized Test Makers try to do it, I get very angry and violent. It’s like trying to grade music. It’s nearly impossible and it’s incredibly foolish to even try. Writing is so much more than just a persuasive essay, so I wonder why, since fourth grade, I have been writing persuasive essays or argumentative essays about what I think should happen to School security in the CMT’s. persuasive or argumentative essays are for important topics, topics about our government system, or about our community. Something I think we should do in social studies or family and consumer science.

 

I also hate it when I’m given an essay, where I am supposed to explain, “Who am I?” because I will stare at my lined paper, and wonder who decided that the lines are blue, and not black, and why the margin line is red. Because the world knows that I will probably be never sure who I am, and neither will anyone else. I know most of the time I can be described with an adjective, but the adjective will always be different, so my resolution next time, is that if someone asks me who I am, I will hand them a dictionary full of adjectives with only a few crossed out, and I will say “I’m sure I’ve been everyone of those adjectives before.” because it’s true. I’ve been kind, and I’ve been mean. I’ve been helpful, and I’ve been lazy. I’ve been selfless, and I’ve been self centered. And that makes me. Because no one is a handful of adjectives explained by a handful of events. It would be like saying that one person from each state represents America perfectly.

 

So now I’m sure my Language Arts teacher is internally seething at the amount of  complaints I’ve just sent her way. She’ll think, “Well then what am I supposed to grade you on? How am I supposed to grade you? I need some examples that you can write more than your first and last name.” and my suggestion to that is let everyone chose their own topic. It could be like a giant thesis project, create an anthology of poems or short stories, a Novel, a collection of argumentative essays or memoirs. If you’re worried about people not working on them throughout time you can just check up on the work every so often. I think the grading process should be made with the student, a rubric can’t fit everyone, this isn’t just a project, it’s  something more. There should be a week where in class everyone works on their works, and the teacher will talk to each student for a while, discussing what they think should be done. It can be graded over time too, so that the teacher isn’t swamped with hours worth of reading at the end of the year.  

 

Brilliant people have been trying to get us to teach ourselves for centuries, even Socrates said “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think”. So I would appreciate it if instead of giving us formats, (My favorite being one where I was given 5 paragraphs and told to come up with 3 main ideas, and 3 outbranching idea for each main idea. Then all I would have to do was fill in the blanks. This essay is about how much I hate essay formats. My first reason is that they’re boring. My second reason is that they teach nothing. My third reason is that they are so uncreative. Thank you for reading my introduction.) Maybe teachers should just give us examples and then set us out on our own adventures of learning. Socrates was famous for his teaching technique of questioning students, and letting them think on their own, rather than telling them what to think (or what to write). Even the Common Core, a curriculum we’ve adopted, used the idea of letting children teach themselves as a slogan. Sadly as a  student of the Common Core, I have yet to see this, but intelligent educators believe that this is how students should be taught! So I beg my Language Arts teacher to see the reason.

So by now my butt is sore from sitting on my porcelain throne, my skin itches and I really need to put some lotion on, and my back aches from sitting with such poor posture. Plus this song I don’t really like has just played for the third time in a row in the past twenty minutes. So in all of this discomfort, I have a conclusion for you. Everyone writes differently, it would be like judging a person’s niceness on how many people they say good morning too, yet a person who might not say good morning to you, might spend their free time volunteering. Everyone achieves being nice in different ways, so it’s unfair to judge a person on their niceness based on a single thing that might make someone nice. So I say stop the generalization, and start the recognition of individuals when it comes to writing.

 

Yours truly and full of complaints,

Melissa.

 

Sources:

Davis, Joshua. "How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses." Wired.com. Conde Nast Digital, 13 Oct. 2013. Web. 02 Mar. 2014. <http://www.wired.com/business/2013/10/free-thinkers/>.