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St Peter's School, Cambridge NZ
torie.johns@stpeters.school.nz

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sadd@oakham.rutland.sch.uk

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chystiakova.olha@academy.com.ua
Thank you all!

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Now I understand: how important asking questions is - from the beginning of the journey
Now I know: that gathering evidence is a great starting point/focus point for students that are struggling
Now I can: return to my colleagues with some really useful resources, knowledge & understanding of how we can support our students better.

Moral of the story: ask good questions!

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Now I understand that the HL essay could be structured towards the end of IBDP year 1.

Now I know that constant reflections can help student develop a line of inquiry.

Now I can better plan my list of works with an understanding of the demands of the HL Essay

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Joanne Craig- British School of Brussels

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Joanne Craig- British School of Brussels

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jcraig@britishschool.be

It was lovely to meet you all

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Now I know how to start with the HL essay.
Now I know how to make the process easier letting the student follow the path.
Now I have tons of ideas how to help my students produce a decent HL essay.

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Now understand how to develop a clear line of inquiry; to get students to identify patterns, and think of those patterns as topic sentences. The IIII as a formula may be better the PEEL

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Now I understand... how narrow a line of inquiry should be, and how important it is to have a specific literary focus
Now I know... how to guide students through the process of formulating a line of inquiry
Now I can... more confidently start the HL essay with my students.

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Accessed via my IB

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10 tips for schools & teachers for the HL Essay

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I would give them a poor essay and a strong one on the same topic.

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Make sure the students understand the conventions and characteristics of the genre/text type they are writing about, so this informs their analysis.

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Examine every paragraph for the way it advances the line of inquiry - great advice!

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Share and unpack successful exemplar essays with the students. With Paper 2 being removed, I have a cohort of students who have not done as much essay writing as usual - they will need to be reminded how to structure and develop an argument.

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how does the structure of the poem present its central concerns?

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My students are very good at following structures and ticking all the boxes. Thinking independently and coming up with their own, insightful ideas is not a strength of many.

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Teaching all of the texts in time so the students have ample choice - getting this right and deciding the order in which to teach is hard.

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Explicit teaching of each, and the differences between the HLE, Paper 1 and Paper 2.

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I need to implement grammar and vocabulary classes.

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Helping students narrow down the questions

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Having never taught an assessment quite this before, I am afraid I won't guide the students properly in choosing a line of inquiry that is neither too narrow nor too broad.

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Writing and self-management skills not brilliant, especially after pandemic.

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Most of my students aren't natives - so they may strugglle with grammar and vocab.

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Subject-specific terminology

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My students have struggled to decide which texts to use for the HL essay v the IO. My students next year will also have to decide which texts to write on for Paper 2. I'm not sure I am guiding them to make the right choices for each assessment.

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Making choices in selecting works for the IO and HLE. And if the body of work is a collection of poems, then making choices of how many and which poems to use for the HLE.

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Making choices in selecting works for the IO and HLE. And if the body of work is a collection of poems, then making choices of how many and which poems to use for the HLE.

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The idea of explicitly addressing authorial choices in relation to their question. Student creating a question that is relevant and not too broad

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The idea of explicitly addressing authorial choices in relation to their question. Student creating a question that is relevant and not too broad

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Students tend to retell the book and the essay turns to be a huge summary instead of the analysis.

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They have no idea where to start and they're often not that well read either.

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They have no idea where to start and they're often not that well read either.

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Many of our students choose HL English because it's their first language and passion for Literature isn't always there.

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Definitely organisation of ideas- often struggling to fit into the word count

Good use of planning

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NZ students have poor writing skills. Many of my students write with inaccuracies and poor command of vocabulary.

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I may not have read all the books students choose. Pretty naive.

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Just one teacher responsible usually  - very few shared resources.

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Just one teacher responsible usually  - very few shared resources.

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Good thesis statements in the intro- students understanding that they need an argument

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Dr. Anna Androulaki-Woodcock has been teaching English since 1988. She started her career in the IB teaching Diploma Programme English and ToK in 2002 and since then she has also taken on the roles of examiner and workshop leader for the IB. Since 2002, her work has had an exclusive IB focus and her perspective has been shaped by teaching in very different and diverse contexts in Greece, Germany, the UK and China.

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Dr. Anna Androulaki-Woodcock has been a professional educator since 1988. BA in English Language and Literature 1988 University of Athens. MA in Linguistics 1991 New York University. PhD in Theoretical Linguistics 2009 University of Reading. Oxford University Press English A: Literature Course Companion for the new

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A conversation on humor in fiction with Elisa Albert, Steve Almond, Brock Clarke, Sam Lipsyte, John McNally, and Deb Olin Unferth

The conversation that follows took place over e-mail in the fall of 2011 and grew out of a belief among Gulf Coast's editors that, while humor occupies a prominent place in American culture, we still don't entirely understand the function of that humor. What exactly is happening when a writer, television host, or stand-up comic invites us to laugh at something? What kind of work is being done, and how is it being done? We considered asking some cognitive psychologists to explain it for us, but they would have used big words we didn't understand, like "cognitive psychology." In the end, we decided to stick to what we know and gathered together some of the funniest fiction writers working today to get their take. In addition to having interesting and enlightening things to say on the means and ends of humor in fiction, they also found time to place the Three Stooges in their proper historical context.
-Zachary Martin

Zachary Martin: Humor is such a living thing that it seems unwise, if not impossible, to try to pin it down. Maybe we can begin by taking its pulse. How comfortably do you think humor resides in the world of literary fiction today? Are there any new or surprising ways you see humor being employed in fictional narrative?

Sam Lipsyte: I'm not sure about a term like "literary fiction" (and I use it myself occasionally, as a shorthand, and I should stop), but what I really do notice is an extreme humorlessness out there. A lot of people who should know better have forgotten that serious writing (another bad category name?) is often quite funny. And I think that attitude is passed on to new readers.

Elisa Albert: Yeah, taking oneself too seriously is an express train to Humorlessland. And lots of literary fiction does tend to take itself really fucking seriously. Also? Trying too hard. Very unfunny. And cleverness. Not at all funny. But there I go trying to pin it down. It's relatively easy to pin down what's not funny. I'll go out on a limb and say humor and power don't go hand in hand; it's usually the disempowered or the disenfranchised who will reliably bring the absurd and make it sparkle. [...]

Brock Clarke: I do think readers, and writers, have a hard time talking about fiction that they find funny [...] I don't know who or what is to blame, exactly, but I do think there's a larger cultural tendency to confuse reverence with seriousness. And once you do that, anything that you think of as literary fiction can't also be funny because it's not serious. But then again, I just used the least funny phrase ever-"larger cultural tendency"-so what do I know?

SL: "Larger cultural tendency" is pretty funny, in fact, but only because you pointed it out and made it so. That's craft.

John McNally: Years ago, I taught a course on the history of humor in American literature, and what I came to realize was that what someone finds funny is already programmed into his or her DNA. I couldn't make any of my students find something funny that they didn't already think was funny. There are a lot of things you can fine-tune in people, but humor doesn't appear to be one of them.

Deb Olin Unferth: When was the great age of funny serious writing? I think of Kafka, Beckett, Stein, and many of the other modernists as being the funniest, most natural, most depressing of the humorists. But was there another great age?

EA : Every age has its great humorists. Rabelais. Swift. The Bible's pretty hilarious, especially as illustrated by R. Crumb. Did anyone see the Werner Herzog cave painting film? I'd bet there are some satirical cave drawings. But humor's hard to translate over time. Comedy can be so intensely specific, so fleeting, so rooted in the precise, idiosyncratic moment.

Steve Almond : The basic misunderstanding Brock mentions begins way back with Aristotle, the idea that the comic and tragic modes are somehow separate and opposed. That's complete nonsense. The comic impulse arises directly from feelings that are inherently tragic: sorrow, shame, disappointment, moral outrage, and so on. Humor is how we contend with the bad data, always has been, from Aristophanes right up to Jon Stewart. [...]
For me, the key distinction is whether the funny stuff is there to force us to face otherwise unbearable feelings, or whether it's just an advertisement for the writer's wit. My favorite writers, many of them crammed into this roundtable clown car, are funny not because they're trying to be, but because they face the dark shit. They get to the truth quicker than I can, by more transgressive paths and with more forgiveness.

JM : I think Steve just conjured the saddest image imaginable: a clown car crammed full of writers. As to his larger point, I think Flannery O'Connor is the perfect example of someone who was funny because of her worldview, not because she was trying to be funny, but because she was always facing darkness head-on in her work. And yet I can't tell you how many times I've taught O'Connor only to hear from students, "She's so depressing." Or they'll look at me like a crazy person when I begin talking about the humor in her work. The idea that something can be both tragic and comic is simply beyond some people. What's the Mel Brooks quote? "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die."

EA : We need humor to save us from realities too painful to otherwise handle. So if a given book isn't going to do the truly difficult work of finding a way to make light of its own dark matter, we should, I think, find a way to do that work for the book. Like an exercise, a game. Do a shot every time the character's father rapes her. Take a hit every time the protagonist almost gets eaten by cannibals. It's just how we survive. If you've never been through anything really heinous, wrong, really just bad , you could be forgiven for thinking that the apocalypse or the funeral of a child is a fully somber affair. The crazy truth is that nothing we go through in life, not even the worst shit imaginable, is only one shade of any emotion.

ZM : I often show my undergraduate students Comedian , a documentary about the year or so Jerry Seinfeld spent putting together a new act. It's always a revelation to them that it takes that much time and dedication to craft anything , but especially humor. There are always a few students willing to admit that they thought comedians just made things up, off the cuff, night after night. Do you feel like that misunderstanding extends to more literary forms of humor as well and to your work in particular?

DOU : It's easy for the novice to look at someone's work and have no conception of the time that went into it, or to look at it without seeing the elegance and the contribution to the form. But I suppose, yeah, writing that's funny is often lauded for being funny and only for being funny, as if that was all the author intended. I recall when Sam's The Ask came out, and review after review talked about how hilarious it was. While the reviews were raves, I wished they could stop talking for one second about how funny it was and pay attention to how devastatingly vulnerable it was.

BC : When talking to students, I always wheel out a line from Donald Barthelme. I ask them, "What must wacky modes do?" The answer: "Break our hearts." Writers themselves have a hard time striking that balance, so it's not surprising that reviewers and readers have a hard time recognizing how important the balance is, or even know how to talk about it when they do see it. But still, it's annoying.
It's also annoying when fiction writers with comic tendencies, whether profane or gentle, get called "humorists." I remember Will Rogers being described as "the humorist Will Rogers." And when I finally got around to listening to humorist Will Rogers, I thought, "So, that's what a humorist is." And I also thought, "God, please do not let me grow up to be a humorist."

SA : Critics tend to regard any trace of mirth as evidence of an essential frivolity. But critics don't have a lot of sex, so you have to forgive them for getting confused.

SL : The whole category of "humorist," well, it's not even a ghetto; it's just a desolate crater. I've always loved that Barthelme bit Brock mentioned. It reminds me of a Harry Crews line [...] where he said something about only being interested in the "crushing of human hearts." His novels are some of the funniest and wildest, but also tuned in to the sadness of it all. It's all about knowing that the funny and the tragic are the same thing.
There's that part of Beckett's Watt about the three kinds of laughter: the bitter, the hollow, and the mirthless. The bitter laugh laughs at that which is not good-it's the ethical laugh. Hollow is the intellectual laugh-it laughs at that which is not true. But it's the mirthless laugh that is the pure laugh. It laughs at that which is unhappy. It recognizes the terror that humans endure, but it's also a laughter streaked with some cruelty, even some self-congratulation. [...]
But this doesn't address the question about popular perception. People don't know how much work anything of value takes, but it's especially true with writing. And especially with writing that might be funny [...] Since we all use language, we all talk, some people have the sense they could take the weekend off and write something amazing and hilarious and meaningful. Many of them probably could for a few pages. But what the real work is about is learning how to sustain it and shape it and weave it all together over and over again with the same consistently excellent results. And also never giving the sense that you've worked at it, that it's been an effort. One must toil mightily for that effect.

Zachary Martin is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University. His fiction, nonfiction, and humor have appeared in places such as McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Washington Square, and Fourth Genre. He is the Editor of Gulf Coast.

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"I Start From a Place of Outrage and Sadness": A conversation with Elisa Albert, Steve Almond, Brock Clarke, Sam Lipsyte, Zachary Martin, John McNally, and Deb Olin Unferth

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A conversation on humor in fiction with Elisa Albert, Steve Almond, Brock Clarke, Sam Lipsyte, John McNally, and Deb Olin Unferth The conversation that follows took place over e-mail in the fall of 2011 and grew out of a belief among Gulf Coast's editors that, while humor occupies a prominent place in American culture, we still don't entirely understand the function of that humor.

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'English teachers are hardworking, committed professionals too often given too little time to grapple with the important questions of what it is to be an English teacher and teach the best of English literature. In 'Making Meaning in English', Didau explores the past of English teaching, the problematic present, whilst offering an exploration of a better future. He digs in the rich traditions of the discipline, whilst offering teachers practical insights so that they can notice the artful craft of English and turn it into compelling action.'

Alex Quigley, Author of Closing the Reading Gap and Closing the Vocabulary Gap

'In this thoughtful and timely book, David Didau identifies all the challenges involved with English curriculum design, which many of us have wrestled with over the years. Through disciplinary practice and substantive knowledge, which he sees shaped by modes of thought such as metaphor, story and pattern, Didau offers a practical means for English teachers to structure their curricula and for students to learn and appreciate the joys of the subject. I only wish this book had been available when I was head of department!'

Phil Stock, Deputy Headteacher, Greenshaw High School, Sutton

'This is a book that invites hyperbole and for good reason. Its scope is spectacular, its details delightful and its provocations powerful. The principles it proposes go beyond English and make it an important read for anyone with curriculum responsibilities who is concerned with creating a proper curriculum. Written with considerable erudition and lightness of touch 'Making Meaning in English' is truly impressive.'

Mary Myatt, Education Adviser and Writer, Author of　 The Curriculum: Gallimaufry to Coherence

'Making Meaning in English' is a mature work, and this maturity can be detected in both its quietly meditative tone and the manner in which Didau, perhaps taking heed of Orwell's ideas about writing, has absented himself from centre stage in order to allow the material to sing. The voice in this text does not feel the need to make any dogmatic assertions of its rightness. It is more grown up than that. What it seeks to do is to quietly inform you of things that you might want to consider about the teaching of English. It is not the 'looking-for-the-quick-buck' of the series of implementable techniques but is more a compendium of interesting pieces of information about the subject that is more wistfully entertaining and informative than it is instrumental. It is punctuated with a host of literary quotations that, not only illustrate the points Didau is making but, of themselves, unlock a landscape of thought and image, and it's replete with interesting things that you had no idea that you needed to know and which caused this English teacher to consider quite deeply his own lack of knowledge in certain areas. It would be very good company indeed on a mazy, yet melancholy, Sunday afternoon sat on a verandah accompanied by wine, and I do not know a single teacher of English, be they NQT or classroom veteran, who would not benefit from reading this.'

Phil Beadle, Author of The Facist Painting

'David Didau has written the essential book for every English teacher. It is urgent and important; I've never read anything like it. But it's not a guide on how to teach English. It's a book about making meaning in English and, as David says, it's about reimagining English as a subject concerned primarily with significance. 'Making Meaning in English' will challenge you, surprise you, niggle at you, and make you think really hard. As English teachers we're part of an ongoing conversation with our subject; David prompts us to consider how we can guide our children to pull up a chair and join in with the conversation, too.'

Claire Stoneman, English Teacher and Writer

'An antidote for a generation of teachers inducted into teaching English through technique-spotting and PEE, this book should be compulsory reading in English departments and ITE courses up and down the land.'

Lawrence Foley, Executive Principal, Harris Academy Tottenham

'David Didau is a singular force in education. It is well known that he writes, speaks, coaches and teaches from a position of restless curiosity　and relishes capsizing a sacred school totem if it is an obstacle to young people's education. His publications help readers teach with excellence. With this wonderful, insightful and personal book, Making Meaning, you also learn how much he deeply loves literature too. You will already, but at the end you'll have fresh understanding of why you do.'

Jude Hunton, Principal, Skegness Grammar School

'David Didau's 'Making Meaning in English' marks a significant, and timely, change in books related to the teaching of English. He looks at an area that has, all too often, been neglected. The knowledge. The ideas. The concepts. Rather than focus on how to teach English, Didau looks at what to teach and when to teach it. What should students learn about?

Refreshingly Didau doesn't polarise aspects in English to knowledge and creativity or traditional and progressive thinking; instead, he explores the key components of English and rationalises what should be taught and why. There are never easy answers in English. Like Van Helsing in Bram Stoker's 'Dracula', Didau is our moral compass in a confusing world where familiar and beloved things have been transformed out of shape and we can, easily, be seduced and bewitched by a powerful, domineering forces like exams. He boldly places a stake through the heart of 'teaching to the exam' and reassuringly covers Years 7 through to 11 with garlic. Thankfully, he stops at chopping people's heads off.

The book is much more than a book on English ideas. It is an exploration of literature and its history　from someone who loves it dearly.　Crammed full of extracts and examples, Didau highlights the beauty and the subtlety of the English language in all its forms.

'Making Meaning in English' is the book I wished I had when I started teaching English.

And, it is the book I want now as I revise our school's curriculum and decide what to teach and when to teach it.

And, it will be the book I go back to when I start a new topic in English.

'Making Meaning in English' is paradigm shift in the teaching of English.'

Chris Curtis, Head of English

'Knowing things, in Saul Bellow's phrase, allows us to open the universe a little more. David's ambitious mission in this book is to explore what might be a body of knowledge for English, a subject that ironically has too often lacked a convincing narrative for its own existence. Through literature we all must attempt to come to terms with and 'try on' a world lived differently, and as teachers, to help students as they start the lifelong process of defining how they see their world. The role of English is to change the way we understand the world around us as well as to unconsciously reinforce the power of Wittgenstein's assertion that, 'The limits of my language are the limits of my world'. In this insightful book, David does just that. This involves him approaching a wide variety of texts and dealing with their ambiguities and uncertainties, engaging with moral dilemmas and in turn illustrating the craft of writing. Richard Wright comments in Black Boy that he hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. In this book, David delivers this with scalpel like sharpness, skill and humour.'

Ian Warwick, Founder & Senior Director, London GTi

'This book is a remarkable achievement. It seeks to relocate the status of literature and English teaching as a vital engine of culture; a noble end in itself rather than a mere preparation for the workplace. It's simply the book I wish I had read when I started teaching English.'

Dr Carl Hendrick, Author of How Learning Happens

'This book is very special. It's about the beauty of English as an academic discipline whilst also offering a practical guide for teachers of the subject. Making Meaning in English addresses the subject with a nuance and faithfulness that warns against reductionism and instead celebrates and embraces the intricacies of English teaching. This book deserves a place on every English teacher's bookshelf.'

Claire Hill, English Teacher, Trust Vice Principal and Author of Symbiosis: The Curriculum and the Classroom

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Making Meaning in English: Exploring the Role of Knowledge in the English Curriculum

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What is English as a school subject for? What does knowledge look like in English and what should be taught? Making Meaning in English examines the broader purpose and reasons for teaching English and explores what knowledge looks like in a subject concerned with judgement, interpretation and value.

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"Sooner or later some such book as this had to be written..." said Basil Hogarth in The Technique of Novel Writing, published in 1934 - possibly the first in what is now a Babel tower of creative writing manuals available to new writers. Most of what is on offer falls into three broad categories: works by academics seeking to treat the creative process with the same level of intellectual rigour given to other forms of analysis, such as David Lodge's The Art of Fiction; write-your-bestseller books, such as Carole Blake's From Pitch to Publication; and chirpy, exercise-based books full of practical anecdote for the newcomer: mea culpa.

In such a bulging field, it is remarkable that there is any gap in the market, but an acerbic American novelist with the improbably suitable name of Francine Prose has found it and filled it. Reading Like a Writer is a clarion call for aspiring writers to do that most simple, time-consuming but enjoyable thing: their homework. Doctors go to medical school, barristers train at the bar: novelists may or may not choose a creative writing course but reading is the one training tool they can't do without. It's a case Prose makes with such vigour as to make this an essential book for any writer, new or experienced, who purports to take his or herself remotely seriously.

Like most authors, Prose has been an avid reader since childhood: "On one family vacation, my father pleaded with me to close my book long enough to look at the Grand Canyon." She read broadly and widely, everything from Carlos Castaneda ("Mary Poppins for people who had outgrown the flying nanny") to Sophocles. It's a habit she has continued throughout her own life as a novelist and teacher of literature and she expresses bafflement at writers who decline to read when they are working on their own book, "for fear that Tolstoy or Shakespeare might influence them. I've always hoped they would."

The point about learning from great writers is well made but if there is fault in this excellent book, it is in Prose's anxiety to defend The Canon. "If a writer's work has survived for centuries, there are reasons why this is so, explanations that have nothing to do with a conspiracy of academics plotting to resuscitate a zombie army of dead white males." Many a writer who happens to be alive, female or brown - or, God forbid, all three - might note that there is hardly a need for much resuscitation.

Prose's defensiveness on this point is probably explained by her experience of teaching on American campuses, where the battle lines are much more sharply drawn than here. Nonetheless, she occasionally appears to be giving writers credit just for being famous: she admiringly quotes a passage full of sentence fragments from American Pastoral by Philip Roth, but later says new writers should pay more attention to grammar. If you're the kind of reader who finds sentence fragments irritating, then they are just as irritating when Roth does it as when your most pretentious student copies him.

Where this book really takes off is with Prose's quite brilliant analysis of the power of detail in fiction. Turning to Kafka, she unpicks the famous opening of The Metamorphosis to show us that what makes us believe that Gregor Samsa really has turned into an insect is not the description of his armour-plated back but the picture that he has hung on his wall, of a lady in a fur stole. "Believing in this picture, we begin to believe in Samsa and in the possibility that he could turn into a bug." It is the ordinary that makes us believe the impossible. This calls to mind Elizabeth Bowen's observation: "The novel lies, in saying that something happened that did not. It must, therefore, contain uncontradictable truth, to warrant the original lie." A few pages later, Prose nails why cliched descriptions are so hopeless at conveying experience, explaining, for instance, why the sentence "Tom bit his lip" is a pointless banality.

Above all, Prose's forthright, waspish and often very funny book is a plea to all writers for vigour and clarity, one which encourages them to tend to the details of technique, and the mastery of language, as closely as they tend to their own ambition. It demands that they love literature as much as they want the literary world to love them - an exhortation many published as well as unpublished writers would do well to heed. Reading Like a Writer makes it clear just how much work is involved in being a writer before, during and after the formulation of a sentence, and that's a point that can't be made often enough.
Louise Doughty's A Novel in a Year is published by Simon & Schuster Topics

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Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose - review

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"Sooner or later some such book as this had to be written..." said Basil Hogarth in The Technique of Novel Writing, published in 1934 - possibly the first in what is now a Babel tower of creative writing manuals available to new writers.

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What was happening behind the Tampa headlines? How do you force a big company to take responsibility for damaging the health of its workers? What do you do when you suspect a famous author is a fake? How does it feel to be on the receiving end of police crowd control? Or on a hillside, spellbound an…

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Why They Can't Write | Johns Hopkins University Press Books

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Warner blames this on decades of educational reform rooted in standardization, assessments, and accountability. We have done no more, Warner argues, than conditioned students to perform "writing-related simulations," which pass temporary muster but do little to help students develop their writing abilities. This style of teaching has made students passive and disengaged.

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Although using the five-paragraph formula to teach essay writing is a ubiquitous practice--and many K-12 teachers defend it--Campbell argues that having students write according to this formula does more harm than good. The formula's tight structure stops the very critical thinking students need to do to strengthen their cognition and their writing skills. Students focus on slotting sentences into a template rather than pondering what they really want to say about a topic. In addition, writing to the formula doesn't lead to the highest scores on standardized tests or prepare kids for college writing--and may reinforce a deficit model of education. Drawing on her experience teaching English language arts, Campbell suggest specific ways teachers can forgo the formula and guide students to read closely, gather evidence, think deeply about an argument they'd like to make, and make informed decisions about how to structure and compose their essay.

Descriptors: Writing (Composition), Writing Instruction, Elementary School Teachers, Secondary School Teachers, Critical Thinking, Elementary School Students, Secondary School Students, Writing Skills, Standardized Tests, Test Wiseness, College Preparation, Critical Reading, Evidence, Persuasive Discourse

ASCD. 1703 North Beauregard Street, Alexandria, VA 22311-1714. Tel: 800-933-2723; Tel: 703-578-9600; Fax: 703-575-5400; Web site: http://www.ascd.org

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ERIC - EJ1043757 - Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay, Educational Leadership, 2014-Apr

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Although using the five-paragraph formula to teach essay writing is a ubiquitous practice--and many K-12 teachers defend it--Campbell argues that having students write according to this formula does more harm than good. The formula's tight structure stops the very critical thinking students need to do to strengthen their cognition and their writing skills.