This is the first time I've ever heard this had a name.

Huh, I was taught the Cornell outline method. I didn't know there was competition!

Outlines have always driven me insane. I prefer to write like a deranged animal and then restructure as necessary

Never saw anything like that, but I more or less gravitated towards something like that. Just Intro - Point 1 - Point 2 - Point 3 - Conclusion

Nice. Been a while since I’ve seen that. I used mind maps, then structured. This seems like the clean version but mine I could write on a chalk/whiteboard before I hand wrote it in the Harvard format. 2000+ word essays, several pages long, MLA style. Always an A.

Dude was a multidimensional being from an alternate future where magic was real and he copied history books. Occam’s razor man, sometimes the simplest answer is the right one. /s just in case.

Essay writing (for example exercises that you are arguing for one side vs the other) is major part how you learn critical thinking.

I suspect that the educated people who were anti vax during covid most likely paid others to write essays for them.

The easiest method to string two sentences together is to simply forget to use a period, right?

LITERALLY cannot string two sentences together. I never want to hear anybody tell me about how writing assignments were a waste of time again

If these young adults can't put two sentences together, then it seems like their writing assignments were definitely a waste of time.

Spark Notes saved me tons of times.

I did that once for some big assignment. I got a B and a "you can do better" from the teacher.

And now anyone who is even remotely good at creative writing or even just passably literate with a good vocabulary are forever going to have their works called into question.

On the other hand, there is no better praise than having some Gen Z kid with terminal brain rot accuse you of talking like an AI model. I accept that implied insult like a gamer accepting a hackusation - I'm winning so much that you can't discern cheating from skill.

thiski'd

Come again?

😆

Good on you as a parent. The majority of parents can't be arsed to teach their children anything.

Teachers can only teach so much without mommy and daddy help. I spent 4 years teaching math at my very small local school. I taught kids from 4th grade to 7th grade. Class size was as small as 4 and as large as 16. I learned very quickly that I needed to be part Grandpa, part child psychologist, part special ed and a teacher. There is no way I could teach every student everyday in the best manor that each of them them needed.

One kid had parents that didn't care. One came from a dirt poor home and I mean dirt poor. Another was ADHD, another autistic, another was very smart and had to either help the other kids or be bored. Others had broken homes and couldn't even live with either parent. Aunts and Grandmothers were raising them.

Tell me, how am I supposed to teach all the math that is needed to all of those kids every day and at a level that meets your exceptions? You should try standing in front of a classroom sometime.

The best thing you can do for your children is to take and active hand in their education at all levels. Whether is reading, math, science, or history. Be involved!

we knew we couldn’t trust the schools to do it well

I am old enough to be taught to read at school (as in actually read and understand). But damn did I not expect school was going to fail next generation even here

Written by hand.

Why not use sticks on a cave wall?

Accidentally write the name of an actor instead of their character in the essay...

I had a teacher warn us about this by telling us about a student who watched Hook instead of reading the short story by Walter Van Tilburg Clark. One is about a juvenile hawk and was written 70 years ago, and the other has Robin Williams and pirates. He said the kid got like a 3/100 on the quiz.

idiot that I am in elementary school did this with Jurassic Park for a book report. I thought I was so damn clever. My teacher read the book, pretty much every adult at the time read the book, I did not read the book.

Handcrafted slop.

fuckinG?

I had an art history class that had hand-written essays for every question on every exam. You brought your composition notebook to class and sat there writing two or three paragraphs for every question. There weren't very many questions (6-8 IIRC), but still it was pretty grueling.

You kids with your fountain pens wouldn’t even know what to do with an ink well.

How much smarter did that make you? Do keyboard users seem like complete fools relatively?

pfff. the Great Gatsby was nothing. now let me give you a book that we hated. Cry the Beloved Country. We had to bullshit discussion groups about it. And we were good at it.

The older I get, the more I realise that the teachers understood that we didn’t read the materials and didn’t respect the process, didn’t put earnest effort in, effectively lied our way through high school.

We all used pinkmonkey.com.

But still. We who tried at the literal eleventh hour to deceive and feign knowledge. We were best in breed.

I shudder to think about my generation in leadership roles.

We got good marks because of pluck, audacity, and sheer tyranny of will. Not because we deserved them. And it was known, to an extent, by both sides.

We are looking at each other in a mirror.

I remember getting told not to use wikipedia as a source and that was pretty obvious. We also got told it was a great jumping off point and that the listed sources could be used. I feel like Wikipedia is the only thing I trust anymore.

I mean it was because averaging a 50 and a 90 was more than a 0 and a 90 😂

Big font. Double spacing. A couple of bullshit tables. I'll turn your essay into 7 pages.

Let me tell you about the time I failed a class for doing extra work. It was a graduate level ethics class, the only F I have on my transcript (and, of course, EVERYONE who sees my transcipts wants to know why I failed ethics in grad school):

The class was Christian Ethics (I was in a theological program) and I had already begun doing my own reading in postmodern theology, which overlapped a lot with Christian ethics. So, when I wrote papers, I drew upon the work I had been reading (which was extra from what was on the syllabus), articulating different approaches to ethical issues based on that work--like I assumed one did in a graduate level course. Every paper I got back was graded terribly. Guys in my class who barely read stuff were acing the class. I couldn't understand. So when I got my failing grade, I considered a few options, deciding on taking a directed study with the professor of the class in the hopes that I could better understand what went wrong.

It was halfway through that directed study that I realized the dude just wanted me to regurgitate the syllabus back at him. He wanted me to basically parrot back his own stuff. Once I figured that out, I did much better. But my wife thinks it's hilarious that I got an F in grad school for doing too much work.

Maybe... but that's the same argument used by Musk to ban music or "foreign" languages' learning in Astra Nova School, since AI can do both "better"...

Learning writing skills and learning to do math are not "pointless exercises". My kids drill math problems and practices writing (sometimes even by hand with a pen and paper!) and they go to a public school.

Testing reading, writing, and math comprehension are important skills to learn. If you think these skills are pointless, you're good and fully fucking cooked.

Lol your obstinace informs your issues.

1. What you think an essay is, was clearly misinformed by some overzealous rubric of the time that has nothing to do with what an essay is, but more the sort they expected.

It's ok to not give a damn to correct that, it's your life.

1. My highest mark for an essay was 4/10 My highest mark for fictional story writing is 19/20.

I went to bed last night watching a 3hr video essay about an analog horror story about parallel universes colliding with reality in a dark forest scenario.

That is to say, an essay was then translated to a video medium as a vehicle to deconstruct a long form fictional writing project in another medium, in a manner that was itself fictional story writing.

In conclusion, you literally have no idea what an essay is, why the fuck would anyone jump to tell you how to write them first?