Preschool Crafts, High School Writing
Read the following essay:
It will be photocopied for you, too. In fact, you’ll be asked to read it offline first, in order to remove the distraction of the Internet. Then you will do the work of understanding the essay:
- Take notes, click on links, ask questions, etc.
- Talk to your peers about their notes, questions, etc.
- Share the essay or its ideas with other folks, and talk to them a bit about what they believe.
- Do the writing assigned below.
To Think More Clearly: March 10 Deadline
Melissa Dahl’s essay emphasizes process over product, which fits your current essay work. The deadline of March 10 was given nearly a month ago, on February 13, alongside a detailed prompt:
What does this week’s reading, “Why Typical Preschool Crafts Are a Total Waste of Time,” have to do with that Orwell essay? Everything. Your assignment is to figure out what happens when you replace “preschool crafts” in Dahl’s article with “high school essay writing.”
To clarify this through a list:
- A “finished” Orwell essay is not due on March 10.
- You can and probably should keep writing after March 10.
- The process of writing is our chief concern and the focus of your self-analysis and metacognition.
Let’s see what you can learn from that process.
Your Assignment
On Friday or over the weekend, write a response that tells the story of your writing process, start to finish, including
- your use of time in class and at home;
- your collaboration with your peers;
- your collaboration with your teacher, including any interstitial or flipped instruction;
- your use of other resources; and
- especially your overall sense of how that writing process unfolded.
To figure out what you’ve learned through your writing, we must have a sense of how you, like some sort of ersatz Frankenstein, brought the response to life. That doesn’t mean your story will, like Frankenstein’s, involve lightning strikes and violence; it means that you should take stock of all the time and energy that went into creating your writing from all its disparate parts.
In other words, you are writing an essay about your essay, or at least about the process of writing your essay. That’s where you will learn the most. Remember the quotation at the top of this website:
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The most important thing you will learn here is something about how you write and how you approach the writing process. In fact, you should weave into this reflective/metacognitive response your thoughts on these three questions:
- What have I accomplished?
- What have I learned?
- What’s next?
Write specifically and purposefully there, too, and focus on efficacy. What new information have you garnered about how you learn? How can you improve future demonstrations of your skills and traits? What lessons can you take away from the writing and post-writing process?