This posts grapples with sufficient and insufficient writing in Honors classes, which means it is built adjacent to another post:
Start there, and keep all of that feedback in mind. This post was originally written for an AP English Language and Composition course, but it should work for any course with Honors- or college-level expectations.
General Feedback: “The Age of the Essay”
This is a common text in our course, both for practical and philosophical applications. The prompt for a response usually looks like this:
Read and respond to “The Age of the Essay.” The instructional post is here, with links to the essay in a few different formats; you can also find the materials you need under the “Education” unit in Google Classroom. Your response should probably not be an essay itself. It is more likely that you will have notes, annotations, short responses, etc., to copy and attach here. Ask questions about this in class and online.
Meanwhile, you should look to publish some of your writing. You can collaborate with me and your peers to apply Graham’s practical advice. Hopefully, you will be able to find the river in some of your observations and insights, and that will give you an essay that deserves to be shared. Copy any links to these Medium posts (or to any other social media publishing platform) in a comment here or on the instructional website.
The examples of student writing below were written around Halloween in 2018, and the focal point of our discussions that week was the last sentence of the first paragraph. Those notes, annotations, short responses, etc., should always shift us toward an essay response. The “probably not” in the third instructional sentence changed.
The notes, etc., are still critical, of course. Here’s what it looks like on my end when students submit digital annotations:
Know that any comments left no an essay in Google Docs also appear on my end when sorting evidence. I can see any attachments to an assignment, too, and click easily between them.
This example will earn credit, sure, but there’s not much feedback to give. During class, I can help you annotate. Before the deadline, I can give you feedback on annotations. Otherwise, again, it earns credit, in the sense that it fulfills a requirement, but it doesn’t propel us toward authentic writing.
As AP students, you need to push more. Ask questions, seek clarification, and write as much as you can. You can all produce essays like this in the amount of time you’re given:
You aren’t seeing the whole thing, of course, but the point is to share the feedback with everyone. I’m able to give that kind of feedback because the work pretty much demands it. It’s thorough and insightful enough to help in a number of ways, as my comment indicates.
Here’s another response that works:
Why is it that we have been taught to do what we’ve been told since we were small toddlers and now out of nowhere, this guy named Paul Graham tells us to not write the way we were told in school? Graham tells us to question things that seem wrong, but to me, Graham’s philosophy on how to write an essay seems wrong. He is telling us how to write a “real” essay, but at what point do school essays turn into real essays? If I wrote a “real” essay instead of a “school” essay and turned it in as a high school assignment, would I get a good grade still? If Graham is correct in his philosophy about essays, why have I never heard of it before? Is it because not enough people question everyday things? At what point do you stop questioning? If Graham tells us to question things that seem wrong, how do you know what seems wrong?
So much of this is great! It’s not an essay, but it accompanies a lot of notes and annotations. The most interesting thing to me is that grades are underpinning the central question about what a student is allowed to do in school. That’s important. But I’d rather talk about this: “If Graham is correct in his philosophy about essays, why have I never heard of it before? Is it because not enough people question everyday things?”
Yes, that’s exactly it. The point of innovation is to break a paradigm in a way that leads to success. Success in school is becoming who you’re meant to be — hokey, still absolutely true — and in being skilled enough to live a good life. Remind yourself of our purpose in here by reading this again, start to finish:
Graham’s not the only person to suggest that school might not have evolved to reflect what truly helps students. The history of anti-establishment rhetoric in education is long and storied1. And the only way to change an establishment is to question it.
Here is another screenshot of feedback, this time for a student who wondered in their first sentence if the essay was “rambling”:
This is why it is often so critical to write more, even if it feels unfocused in the moment. You can stumble across a a line like that one: “That’s math with words.” An essay could shape itself almost entirely around that line.
Here’s another screenshot of feedback, attached to a student’s work:
I’m going to embed a lot more screenshots, because you need to learn from each other, not just me. You can do that interstitially. If you start to ask questions and engage each other this way, you’ll see results almost immediately.
General Feedback: Short Essays
It’s important, obviously, for you to start using the space differently, and not just to work harder from bell to bell. You must be more efficient and effective with each other. For instance, you were asked to read this instructional post, which was assigned as part of the original Paul Graham post. Here’s how it looked in your browser:
Not enough of you clicked through to read that. At least one person did, however, and wrote about it:
Splitting the atom refers to breaking apart a community. This meaning in learning and collaborating with other people. Ken Robinson is advising against splitting up. Collaborating and working with others is so important, and reading about it this year I have realized that. In the video we watched earlier in class, he explained why. Maybe you don’t have the right idea or you need help. Sometimes, you need another person’s opinion. The table I sit at has recently gotten bigger, and I have learned more about these people. [One] helps me a lot with my writing because we are very similar and use a lot of the same techniques. Collaboration is very important in learning about yourself, helping others, and improving your writing. Having a plan and putting in effort into the class makes it easier to collaborate with people and help them realize the purpose of these assignments or even the purpose of smaller things like reading. By putting in effort in my own work I can them help others.
Analysis can be confusing, because you don’t want to over-analyze something and read too much into it. You can improve by studying others, and reading their writing and even the analysis of that. “You need to walk a sometimes fine line between refining what you do and overthinking it, between having knowledge of the discrete elements of, e.g., writing or collegiality, and obsessing over minutiae.” Overthinking is something that I suffer from a lot. I tend to overthink things and then I over-analyze my writing. I get nervous that it isn’t as good as I think it is or that I won’t make sense. I need to be careful about reading too much into my own writing and overthinking what I know sounds good or is right.
That’s one of the strongest students in the space this year, and someone who, at their current pace, will earn a profile score of 9 all year. That’s an average of 100 in a college-level course. Why? Because they are writing about collaboration and doubt and overthinking in response to an instructional post that is making them better at tackling all of those things. They are actively looking for the branching pathways. They are writing constantly.
As another example, again in concert with that post on maximizing your time, here is what one of you wrote around 10/24/18:
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That’s a 48-hour essay, more or less. If you read when you’re asked to read and write when you’re asked to write, you will be able to produce thoughtful and meaningful responses at this pace. It will feel like you are exploring authentic ideas that affect you personally because that’s exactly what you are doing.
That same student also wrote this, which highlights what I mean:
Psychonaut: Greek, meaning “a sailor of the soul.” Quite obviously a lofty description, but it is Greek, so it’s neither surprising or entirely inaccurate. To avoid the Greek’s love of a good drama, psychonautics can better be described as, “the means to study and explore consciousness (including the unconscious) and altered states of consciousness; it rests on the realization that to study consciousness is to transform it.” The most important part of the quote is the last part, stating that to transform or alter your consciousness you must first understand it, and this is what capable psychonauts do so well. Before the video and the research on psychonauts, I was under the impression that I would be a capable psychonaut, because I spend so much time in my own head and in made up worlds. However, after watching the video and doing more research, I have realized that I am a psychonaut, but simply a poor one. I think a good metaphor for this ties back to the etymology: “A sailor of the soul.” A capable psychonaut would be a captain of a ship floating in the mind, that would never get lost or lose its way, and always be where the captain needed it. In the sense of procrastination, the captain would position the ship in a place that would benefit the work environment, and thus the work would be done in a timely fashion. I, however, would classify myself as incapable psychonaut. I am captain of a ship that usually has no intention or placement. My boat is an exploration vessel on the infinite waves of my imagination, and it never has direction. While this is great for daydreaming and for having a good imagination, it is a poor system for procrastination, as the boat has no predetermined position. So as the deadline is approaching and the brain needs to be in the right position, the boat is not and thus it is harder to do the work. I think the key for me and for others to break the habit of procrastination it so simply give our captains a map. If we can break the habits or hack the system we have, then we can at least beat procrastination, because it cannot be erased or destroyed. Like the definition states, to understand the consciousness is to transform it. So, I and whoever else has the issue of procrastination, really needs to just think about our ships and our captains: and what they’re doing wrong.
The metaphor work here is effective because it becomes actionable. It’s an insight that leads somewhere. It’s also clever and curious, investigating etymologies and grappling with the true meaning of “capable psychonaut.”
Right now, you can check your own investment in this process. Are you skimming these excerpts? Or are you reading them carefully, looking for why these students are featured? Are you learning from them or passing them by? In that second excerpt is a lot of what you should be capable of already: to work in metaphors; to explore your own insight; to grapple with what you’ve read, specifically and repeatedly; to make the connections between what you read and write; and to learn more about yourself, purposefully and honestly, again and again.
Here’s another essay, this one from 10/25/18, from a student who regularly receives feedback because of how hard they work:
I’m responding to them here, not through Google, because this student will read this post. They’ll see their work being celebrated, and they’ll feel validated. Then I can say this:
They are successful because they see the connections between all three short essays, the overall goal of the work you’re doing, and the need to distinguish between each step. There’s even a link to a previous essay. But the real strength is the insight, which comes from open-mindedness and assiduousness. The idea of being a “selective psychonaut” is clever and original. It’s a perfect qualifier for metacognitive habits.
They even move toward a plan in the final paragraph, noting that this is the real purpose of writing three times on what is ostensibly the same subject. That, too, speaks to a careful consideration of what we’re studying and why.
The Takeaway: Teach Each Other
One reason to compile all these examples of sufficient writing, on top of a previous all-purpose post on the same subject, is to give some of you the models you need. You can emulate what you read here from your peers. In that way, those peers are teaching you. They’re providing an emulative guide.
What you must all endeavor to do now, however, is to teach each other more actively, and to ask for help more regularly. Seek out students who seem to be successful. Look at their feedback. What have they been told to do? What comments have been left on their writing? Use them as proxies for your own work.
Remember that feedback in here works differently. At its peak, it will be as effective and efficient as anything else, but your investment determines that peak.
Try this one by John Taylor Gatto, if you have a few minutes. It’s good. ↩