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The Saturday Essay News | Wall Street Journal

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Discover the latest and breaking The Saturday Essay news from The Wall Street Journal.

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I know a guy whose wife fell in love with another man. She told him about it first thing in the morning on a summer day. She then went to start the coffee.

What did you do? I asked.

Just lay abed, he said, listening to her puttering in the kitchen. Everyone thinks that awful comes by itself, but it doesn't. It comes hand in hand with normal. No one talks about this. You're watching the basketball game when the phone rings and you find out your grandfather didn't wake up this morning. At the scene of the terrible car crash there's a baseball glove that fell out of one of the cars. The awful is inside the normal. Like normal is pregnant with awful. We know this, but we don't talk about it. A guy has a stroke at his desk, but no one knows because he has the door closed, which everyone takes as a sign he's on an important call. I just lay abed. It wasn't heavy, like I couldn't move or anything. It wasn't dramatic. I was just listening. She got the coffee ready and I shuffled out and we had coffee and didn't say anything. No words came to mind. That's another thing no one says - that when you are completely shocked and horrified and broken and aghast, you don't actually rage and weep and storm around the house. Or at least I didn't. Maybe some people do. But I don't think so. I think probably most people are like me and just continue along, doing what they were going to do. I took a shower and got dressed and went to work. My brother says I must have been in shock, but I don't know about that. I mean, I was shocked, sure I was. But I think it's more that there had been a terrible car crash and I was noticing the normal. It was a Saturday, so the kids were sleeping in. I go to work on Saturdays, so I went to work. Lovely day, one of those days when you see dragonflies all day long. Dragonflies are very cool. People think you look for metaphors after something like that, but I think we just keep walking. That's what I think. I mean, of course I thought about stuff like should we get divorced and how could she fall in love with another guy and how come she fell out of love with me, but mostly I thought about the kids. Sometimes I thought about the other guy, but not so much. I did wonder if we could ever get it together again, but not too much. I went to the bank and to pick up a suit at the tailor. I had a hard few moments there, because the tailor gave me an envelope with the stuff that had been in my suit pockets. This was my best suit, so I wore it for dates and weddings and wakes. There were a couple of Mass cards from funerals and wedding invites, but also there were two tampons just in case she needed them, and a photo of us at a wedding on the beach, and a ring our daughter had given me, one of those rings that you can make whistle. That ring nailed me. You would think it would be the photo of us beaming on the beach, but it was the ring.

A soldier friend of mine tells me the same thing happens when you are in a fight: that everything's normal, and then it isn't, and then it's normal again, except if there are guys screaming or crumpled and not screaming. You get up cautiously from where you are kneeling, and you look around, and everything's just like it was a minute ago, coffee and dragonflies and the kids sleeping in, and then you just keep moving. It's sort of boring, I guess, from a certain perspective.
Brian Doyle had surgery last November to remove a brain tumor. See our note in this issue for information on how you can help him and his family.

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Everyone Thinks That Awful Comes By Itself, But It Doesn't - The Sun Magazine

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Everyone thinks that awful comes by itself, but it doesn’t. It comes hand in hand with normal. No one talks about this. You’re watching the basketball game when the phone rings and you find out your grandfather didn’t wake up this morning.

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We are at a parade. It is Memorial Day. I am sitting on the curb in front of the church with my brother, reserving our family's spot. The rest of the family is coming along slowly, our father carrying the baby, but my brother and I have run ahead because we don't want to miss a single soldier in uniform or girl twirling a baton or bespectacled beaming cherubic man wearing a fez. We might see an elephant. We will see horses and firetrucks. We will see politicians in convertibles. We will see men older than our dad wearing their Army uniforms. Army is green and the others are blue. Our dad will not walk in the parade wearing his uniform. He declines politely every year when he is asked. He says he no longer has his uniform. He says he does not know where it went, although we think he does know where it went. He says he wore it only because the job had to be done, and now that the war is over, there is no reason to have a uniform. He says uniforms are dangerous statements, if you think about it. He says uniforms can easily confer false authority, and encourage hollow bravado, and augment unfortunate inclinations, and exacerbate violent predilections. This is how he talks. He says uniforms are public pronouncements, like parades, and we should be careful about what we say in public. He says we should be leery of men marching in uniforms. He says no one has more respect for members of the armed forces than he does, but that it would be a better world if no one ever had to take up arms, and that is a fact. He says in his experience it is the man who has been in a war who understands that war is cruel and foolish and sinful, and anyone who defends war as natural to the human condition is a person of stunted imagination. He says a study of history shows not only that we are a savage species but that we are a species capable of extraordinary imaginative leaps. He says that someday we might devise ways to outwit violence, as Mr. Mohandas Gandhi tried to do. He says most wars, maybe all wars, are about money in the end, and that when we hear the beating of war drums, we should suspect that it is really a call for market expansion. He says war is a virus and imagination is the cure.

Our father does not have his uniform anymore, but he does have a wooden box in a drawer in his bureau at home. There are medals and service bars and ribbons in the box. We have secretly opened the box, my brother and I, and handled its contents, and put them back exactly the way we found them, so that he would not know, but he knows. His photographs are in another drawer. In them he is tall and thin and shockingly young. He is a private, a sergeant, a lieutenant. He is on Bougainville Island in the South Pacific. Then he is in the Philippines. He is preparing for the invasion of Japan. He is preparing to die.

Today he is standing next to us at the Memorial Day parade as the soldiers and sailors pass by. Some men in the crowd salute, but he does not. He keeps his eyes locked on the soldiers, though, even as we are pulling at his hands and pant legs and the baby is crying and wriggling. The one time he hands off the baby and applauds quietly is when the firemen pass by in their trucks. After the firemen come the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, and the Little League baseball players, and the Knights of Columbus, and the Rotary Club, and finally a visiting fife-and-drum corps from Ireland, and then we walk home, our dad carrying the baby, who fell asleep just after the Girl Scouts walked by.

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Our dad will not walk in the parade wearing his uniform. He declines politely every year when he is asked. . . . He says uniforms are dangerous statements, if you think about it. He says uniforms can easily confer false authority, and encourage hollow bravado, and augment unfortunate inclinations, and exacerbate violent predilections.

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Aeon is a magazine of ideas and culture. We publish in-depth essays from the world's most incisive and ambitious thinkers, and a mix of original and curated videos - free to all.

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Let's face it: no one likes grading student essays, because student essays, in general, aren't very good. When you're halfway through a pile of essays that seem rote and devoid of thought, it's easy to feel your soul shriveling. Students don't usually enjoy the experience, either -- for them it's hard, time-consuming and anxiety producing. And, as several writers have recently pointed out, academic essays don't play much of a role outside academe.

But does that mean we should stop seeing essays as the baseline work college students do? A rash of articles in recent years have suggested exactly that.

Canadian teacher Jon David Groff, for instance, writes that essays don't prepare students for the real-world work. They are, he says, "a highly inauthentic form of writing." Rebecca Schuman, in an article that got a fair bit of attention in Slate, also claims that writing essays isn't worth the time and trouble. Schuman focuses on three issues: "bad" essays, the careless students who produce them and the labor involved in teaching and grading essays. Schuman concludes by saying that essays should be reserved for advanced humanities majors and that everyone else should just take exams. After all, she says, "you cannot bullshit a line-ID."

It's true that the prevalent essay form -- the five-paragraph essay -- is usually awful to read and boring to write. Karen Harris's recent piece for Times Higher Education focuses, quite reasonably, on how formulaic that kind of essay is. (A typical five-paragraph essay starts with a big, overarching thesis statement, backs it up with three interchangeable examples, then restates the thesis). Harris blames fusty academics wed to an out-of-date and restrictive form for the essay's failures. She would prefer that students have more options: perhaps, she suggests, a student might create "a dialogue, a series of letters, an animation or a documentary."

Options aren't a bad thing, of course, but while animations and documentaries may feel more contemporary, they don't actually offer students the learning opportunities inherent in essay writing. If our goal is to teach students to think hard, then the essay remains a crucial feature of a college education and trashing it is a classic case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Teaching writing may be difficult, but that doesn't mean it's not worth the effort. And though it's tempting to imagine a world without lousy papers to grade, the let's-get-rid-of-the-essay movement has many problems.

First, it's mistaken in its understanding of what we're setting out to teach students. If our goal is to instruct them in who Renoir or Freud was and what they did or said, then a line-ID or animation works fine. But if our goal is to teach students to read critically, ask questions, perform meaningful analysis, marshal arguments, draw conclusions and communicate complex ideas -- the most "real-world" skills of all -- then there's no replacing the essay. You may not be able to "bullshit a line-ID," but you also can't fake the skills essay writing requires. Those habits of mind are hard to learn and hard to teach -- but they're the most important approaches that students acquire in college.

A second, related problem is the old story of academic labor and the question of what academe values. When student papers are terrible, we tend, in our frustration, to blame the students. But students who are "bad writers" are actually the victims of a system rigged against them. As anyone who has taught a composition course knows, the profession tends to view the teaching of writing as a "service" or "skills" activity. It's scut work, and it's usually foisted on the least powerful and most overworked people in the system: adjuncts, contract instructors and pretenure instructors. Some unfortunates have to teach writing -- and spend countless hours grading papers, at very low pay -- while others can focus on teaching the exciting big ideas they went to grad school to study. Unsurprisingly, given this system, writing pedagogy receives short shrift in graduate programs and professional development -- so most professors never learn how to teach writing. We've met plenty of eager, dedicated teachers doing their best with virtually no training in the work they've been asked to do.

As a result of this lack of preparation and downplaying of writing pedagogy as a meaningful activity, professors tend to see writing as a more or less "natural" activity, one that some people are born to do and others are not. But that is a confusion of student preparation and student ability. When we assume that some students just "can't" write, we overlook inequities in resources and preparation. It's easy to laud those who "can" write while overlooking the fact that they tend to be privileged graduates of elite public and private schools, clustered in colleges and universities that value the liberal arts. And when professors suggest that some students aren't served by the essay, they're signing off on a tiered class system where some students get the good stuff while others are spared the task of having to think hard.

The third, related issue that affects students' writing and learning is affinity. Students who resemble their professors -- who think in narrative, have read widely, understand writing as a persuasive act -- are rewarded and valued. Those who don't think like their instructors are not. But often students who "can't write" can write quite well if they're taught in ways that make sense to them. At the Cooper Union, where we've done most of our teaching, our students are art, engineering and architecture students. And they often tell us that they don't think in narrative but in numbers and equations, or in 3-D, or in images. They don't necessarily learn by listening to a lecture on writing. They learn by doing, and they learn better -- and produce better work -- when they understand the point of essay writing. That means understanding essay writing as an analytical act that involves starting with something in a text that they don't already understand or know, taking apart the text to try to figure out what's going on, coming to some conclusions, and then sharing their discoveries with readers.

Teaching students who aren't "instinctive" (or privileged or well-prepared) writers isn't easy, because it requires us as teachers to approach writing in new ways. But as we've learned over the years, the payoff is considerable: when writing makes sense to students, they produce work they care about and find interesting and challenging -- as well as work that is much more engaging for their instructors.

If we really value meaningful student learning, it's time for all of us -- not just the small world of composition and rhetoric studies, but academe as a whole -- to put time and resources into the project of better writing instruction. "Bad" writers aren't the problem; bad assignments and ill-trained and underpaid teachers are. And this means that the essay isn't the problem and that throwing it out won't fix anything. Instead, what's needed is a reassessment of how the essay is defined and taught. And that isn't our students' responsibility: it's ours.

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Colleges should invest more in teaching students how to write (essay)

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Let's face it: no one likes grading student essays, because student essays, in general, aren't very good. When you're halfway through a pile of essays that seem rote and devoid of thought, it's easy to feel your soul shriveling. Students don't usually enjoy the experience, either -- for them it's hard, time-consuming and anxiety producing.

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The traditional medium for assessing students is a tired, restrictive form. It's time for more dynamic, creative ones, argues Karen Harris

There is a scene in The Horse and His Boy, one of C. S. Lewis' Narnia chronicles, in which the fugitive, Aravis, explains why she fled her homeland. As she begins, she switches to a style of speaking that is florid, poetic and quite captivating - for in her country, children are taught how to tell stories, just like English children are taught how to write essays. "The difference", Lewis tells us, "is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays."

It is hard to disagree with Lewis that, as a medium for communicating ideas, the traditional student essay is fundamentally unexciting. One issue is the requirement for "formal" language at all times - even though academic writers who succeed in engaging with their readers often do so by writing texts that are lively, enthusiastic and frequently irreverent, encompassing the odd anecdote, colloquialism and venture into the personal.

The standard essay structure is an even bigger problem. Its thesis statement and topic sentences act like spoilers, so the reader is afforded little suspense or surprise. And this formulaic pattern, far from making standardised marking easier, may actually undermine fair grading because bored assessors might start assigning grades erratically or arbitrarily.

Moreover, the thesis statement can actually be the enemy of critical enquiry because it straitjackets the writer into a line of argument that has to be defended to the death, blithely bulldozing - or simply ignoring - any tentative "yes, but..." that might get in the way. This is not a trivial issue. The tyranny of being forced to declare one's position pervades our culture, from the school debating societies to our adversarial parliamentary system, where admitting that the opposing side may have a point is political anathema. This approach is potentially anti-intellectual - for when critical thinking is applied to most issues, it becomes apparent that there are multiple viable perspectives, which can both diverge and converge.

Is there not a case for replacing the traditional essay with something more exploratory and open-ended - perhaps akin to a research project? From an early stage, students could be trained to become more aware of issues such as bias, limitation, validity and reliability; how to select, interrogate and categorise their data; how to connect findings with theory. The structure of a project write-up allows for a deeper consideration of these underlying areas, and liberates the student from the imperative to follow a single cohesive line of reasoning. Reality, after all, does not follow laws of cohesion and - to cite Chekhov - it can be more illuminating to pose questions rather than to purport to have answers.

Another fundamental problem with the essay is that it imposes a rigid, one-size-fits-all framework on to every conceivable topic. Not everything is suited to this linear, verbal model: alternatives could be borrowed from other disciplines and methods of assessment. There might be cases where diagrams and annotated illustrations would express ideas and the relationships between them with greater clarity and succinctness. In other instances, submitting work in the form of - for example - a dialogue, a series of letters, an animation or a documentary might reveal a huge amount of creative potential, originality and insight. Could the message, and the student's own leanings, occasionally be allowed to determine the most appropriate medium?

Undergraduates now are predominantly digital natives, while the essay comes from a tradition of ink on paper, fixed and immutable. Intellectually and stylistically restrictive, it discourages experimentation with the rich possibilities of communication and does not always serve either the topic or the writer adequately.

Does the academy's reluctance to embrace radically alternative forms reflect a lack of courage? Possibly. But in a dynamic multimedia age, where so much is in a state of flux and uncertainty, we should be looking beyond the static forms that bored C. S. Lewis more than 60 years ago and at least considering the daunting but exhilarating new possibilities.
Karen Harris is a tutor of English for academic purposes at the University of the Arts London.

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The traditional medium for assessing students is a tired, restrictive form. It's time for more dynamic, creative ones, argues Karen Harris There is a scene in The Horse and His Boy, one of C. S. Lewis' Narnia chronicles, in which the fugitive, Aravis, explains why she fled her homeland.

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Everybody in college hates papers. Students hate writing them so much that they buy, borrow, or steal them instead. Plagiarism is now so commonplace that if we flunked every kid who did it, we'd have a worse attrition rate than a MOOC. And on those rare occasions undergrads do deign to compose their own essays, said exegetic masterpieces usually take them all of half an hour at 4 a.m. to write, and consist accordingly of "arguments" that are at best tangentially related to the coursework, font-manipulated to meet the minimum required page-count. Oh, "attitudes about cultures have changed over time"? I'm so glad you let me know.

Nobody hates writing papers as much as college instructors hate grading papers (and no, having a robot do it is not the answer). Students of the world: You think it wastes 45 minutes of your sexting time to pluck out three quotes from The Sun Also Rises, summarize the same four plot points 50 times until you hit Page 5, and then crap out a two-sentence conclusion? It wastes 15 hours of my time to mark up my students' flaccid theses and non sequitur textual "evidence," not to mention abuse of the comma that should be punishable by some sort of law-all so that you can take a cursory glance at the grade and then chuck the paper forever.

What's more, if your average college-goer does manage to read through her professor's comments, she will likely view them as a grievous insult to her entire person, abject proof of how this cruel, unfeeling instructor hates her. That sliver of the student population that actually reads comments and wants to discuss them? They're kids whose papers are good to begin with, and often obsessed with their GPAs. I guarantee you that every professor you know has given an A to a B paper just to keep a grade-grubber off her junk. (Not talking to you, current students! You're all magnificent, and going to be president someday. Please do not email me.)

When I was growing up, my mother-who, like me, was a " contingent" professor-would sequester herself for days to grade, emerging Medusa-haired and demanding of sympathy. But the older I got, the more that sympathy dissipated: "If you hate grading papers so much," I'd say, "there's an easy solution for that." My mother, not to be trifled with when righteously indignant (that favored state of the professoriate), would snap: "It's an English class. I can't not assign papers."

Mom, friends, educators, students: We don't have to assign papers, and we should stop. We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure. The baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma: abjectly necessary for any decent job in the cosmos. As such, students (and their parents) view college as professional training, an unpleasant necessity en route to that all-important " piece of paper." Today's vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utter waste of their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students' effing papers. It's time to declare unconditional defeat.

Most students enter college barely able to string three sentences together-and they leave it that way, too. With protracted effort and a rhapsodically engaged instructor, some may learn to craft a clunky but competent essay somewhere along the way. But who cares? My fellow humanists insist valiantly that (among other more elevated reasons) writing humanities papers leads to the crafting of sharp argumentative skills, and thus a lifetime of success in a number of fields in which we have no relevant experience. But my friends who actually work in such fields assure me that most of their colleagues are borderline-illiterate. After all, Mark Zuckerberg's pre-Facebook Friendster profile bragged "i don't read" ( sic),and look at him.

Of course it would be better for humanity if college in the United States actually required a semblance of adult writing competency. But I have tried everything. I held a workshop dedicated to avoiding vague introductions ("The idea and concept of the duality of sin and righteousness has been at the forefront of our understanding of important concepts since the beginning of time.") The result was papers that started with two incoherent sentences that had nothing to do with each other. I tried removing the introduction and conclusion altogether, and asking for a three-paragraph miniessay with a specific argument-what I got read like One Direction fan fiction.

I've graded drafts and assigned rewrites, and that helps the good students get better, but the bad students, the ones I'm trying to help, just fail to turn in any drafts at all. Meanwhile, I come up for air and realize that with all this extra grading, I'm making 75 cents an hour.

I'm not calling for the end of all papers-just the end of papers in required courses. Some students actually like writing, and let those blessed young souls be English majors, and expound on George Eliot and Virginia Woolf to their hearts' content, and grow up to become writers, huzzah. But for the common good, leave everyone else out of it.

Instead of essays, required humanities courses (which I support, for all the reasons William Cronon, Martha Nussbaum, and Paulo Freire give) should return to old-school, hardcore exams, written and oral. You cannot bullshit a line-ID. Nor can you get away with only having read one page of the book when your professor is staring you down with a serious question. And best of all, oral exams barely need grading: If you don't know what you're talking about, it is immediately and readily manifest (not to mention, it's profoundly schadenfroh when a student has to look me in the face and admit he's done no work).

Plus, replacing papers with rigorous, old-school, St. John's-style tribulations also addresses an issue humanities-haters love to belabor: Paper-grading is so subjective, and paper-writing so easy to fake, that this gives the humanities their unfortunate reputation as imprecise, feelings-centered disciplines where there are "no right answers." So let's start requiring some right answers.

Sure, this quashes the shallow pretense of expecting undergraduates to engage in thoughtful analysis, but they have already proven that they will go to any lengths to avoid doing this. Call me a defeatist, but honestly I'd be happy if a plurality of American college students could discern even the skeletal plot of anything they were assigned. With more exams and no papers, they'll at least have a shot at retaining, just for a short while, the basic facts of some of the greatest stories ever recorded. In that short while, they may even develop the tiniest inkling of what Martha Nussbaum calls "sympathetic imagination"-the cultivation of our own humanity, and something that unfolds when we're touched by stories of people who are very much unlike us. And that, frankly, is more than any essay will ever do for them.

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Students Hate Writing Papers. Professors Hate Grading Papers. Let's Stop Assigning Them.

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Everybody in college hates papers. Students hate writing them so much that they buy, borrow, or steal them instead. Plagiarism is now so commonplace that if we flunked every kid who did it, we'd have a worse attrition rate than a MOOC.