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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]There are now online critiques of writing assignments. I've heard of schools where kids upload their documents and get critiqued by each other during the draft phase. This along with some teacher comments during the school day I would think would be enough and then the final can be critiqued by the teacher.[/quote]

Former writing teacher here.

There are many things that would be "enough" and still be consistent with high quality teaching of writing.  For starters, honor students in high school do not need copy edits from their teachers.  They can just be told to fix their mechanics and sent to the writing lab.  They certainly need good comments on their argument - where the analysis was good or not good, the opportunity for an appointment to discuss if confused, but they don't need their grammar edited.  What they need is to rewrite, because that's how we learn.

It does not take 40 minutes to provide decent feedback on a five paragraph in-class essay, especially when all kids are writing the same essay.  [/quote]

Kids in middle school and high school should be writing more than 5 paragraph essays in class, no? Isn't that more of an elementary level?[/quote]

I didn't write a 5 paragraph essay until my freshman year of HS and I ended up at an Ivy League school.[/quote]

My fourth grader has been working on 5 paragraph essays all year and we've heard other schools start in 3rd grade. By high school kids should be writing papers.[/quote]

I did write papers in HS.  [b]Freshman year, we learned how to write a 5 paragraph essay and by junior year, we were writing our first research paper.  Senior year was a lot of essays and a few research papers.[/b]  [/quote]

This is shocking.  My freshmen have just submitted the first drafts of their research papers.  I cannot fathom why a freshman class would be learning how to write a 5 paragraph essay (something they should have learned and practiced throughout late elementary/middle school)!  Junior year is appallingly late to be learning to write a "first research paper": this is NOT college track, and not the path taken by AP or IB students.  [/quote]

[b]It was a college prep school.[/b]  Earlier doesn't always equal better.  As for AP classes, they weren't that popular at my HS since it was a college prep school.  Never heard of IB classes until reading DCUM.[/quote]

I don't believe you.  I teach at a "college prep school", but even my friends who teach in public are not teaching freshmen to write 5 paragraph essays.  What you describe is akin to saying that you first learned how to multiply single digits in 8th grade.  Students learn to write the class "5 paragraph essay" in elementary/middle, and should be doing more than that in late middle school.  [/quote]

I don't care if you don't believe me.  I went to a Catholic middle school and then a different Catholic prep school.  This was in the late 80s/early 90s.  Nobody I knew was writing 5 paragraph essays in elementary school.  I think I remember writing 2-3 paragraphs summaries in my middle school classes for our independent reading books but we spent nearly all of 8th grade diagramming sentences.  Good fun!  Hell, we were still reading from basal readers in middle school.  The first time I read a real novel in school was in 8th grade when I was pulled out of class for enrichment.  We read [u]The Once and Future King[/u].  I was so excited for high school since we got a book list for summer reading and while I read plenty of books on my own or for outside of school book reports, we didn't read actual books in school.  [/quote]

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