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a High School English Teacher
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We have a tendency, as a society, to listen to literally ANYBODY but teachers on the subject of education. I think that's a lot of what's going on here.
I don't think the purpose of education is to prepare workers for jobs (either jobs in general or the specific jobs that OP's husband is thinking about). I think it should teach students a variety of skills and knowledge, and I think the sort of investigation and deep thinking involved in writing is a better way to do that than having them make videos (though there's still a place for that, in a video production class).
If we want to have a conversation about how easy it is to get a high school diploma without actually learning any of those skills or knowledge, that might be a more productive discussion. But it would mostly be teachers saying that standards should be raised, so very likely nobody would listen.
I believe that is misguided for a few reasons.
As a dual-credit writing instructor, I have had numerous students come back to me and thank me because the majority of their large grades are written essays.
When I was in school, 7 years ago, the majority (I’d wager 75%) of my assignments were larger written works, even in non lit classes. My history courses were heavily writing centric. Of course, this is all subjective, but I prepare my writers for the most difficult of instructors, not the easiest. Not all college bound students will be heavily focused writing, but many will. The ones who have been shown how to write and don’t have to write in college suffer no harm. The ones who have not been taught writing and need it in college will be behind their peers.
Colleges also have had to unteach the simplistic form of high school writing. The more we dumb it down and say they can learn it in college, the harder we are making it on our students and their future professors. I have spoken to many professors who say they have to unteach high school writing before building a foundation because high school teachers continue to lower the bar for their writing standards. UNC and Kentucky had excellent articles on these when I wrote a paper over this a few years back.
Not only that, research papers (and longer essays as a whole work on many other skills and abilities). My students gain the ability to research in a variety of mediums, gain intrapersonal skills by conducting their very own interviews with experts in the field they are researching, gain organizational skills by writing a complex paper with varying ideas different than their own, learn the art of being unbiased by addressing counterclaims and giving them merit while establishing their point of view is stronger than any counterclaim, and more.
Lastly, I’m not entirely sure what students using videos has to do with it. Many of my students use videos in their research papers. In fact, I encourage it. MLA has specific ways to cite a plethora of videos, and my students often do. That is absolutely okay. For one of their research papers they even craft a video themselves, so I see no issue with that take. They craft the video after writing the paper in my course. However, videos are often not entirely credible, and they learn many things from unreliable social media apps that have been doctored/ are not true. I’m not sure a research paper (or video) should be taken seriously when it cites a plethora of tik-tok user names as the experts in place of MD’s from a scholarly database.
Lastly, AI tools cannot do student writing. AI tools write. They can write at an average level without much personality and without grammatical error, but they can’t write my students research/compare contrast essay over what college will be the best fit for them, at least not adequately.
And it’s true that large writing assignments (10+ pages) are on the decline in higher education. But 4-8 page papers are still quite common amongst most colleges.
Thank you for this very detailed response! It gives me reassurance that I'm not being unreasonable in my desire to keep a lot of writing in my classes.
One of the issues I run into is that I teach at a small, rural, Title 1 school where only a minority of our students end up attending college. (I envy you having enough ambitious students to justify a dual credit program!) Given this, it has been a struggle to persuade other students that the writing I require is relevant to their lives.
I like the idea to create a video after writing the paper; this may engage students in the writing process more fully, recognizing that they will be creating a video afterward.
Here are a few sources on average essay length, average essays in college, and the UNC page about how high schools are already simplifying academic writing too much.
https://studentstrategy101.com/blog/how-much-writing-will-you-do-as-a-college-undergrad/#:~:text=The%20recent%20survey%20found%20that,while%20seniors%20wrote%20146%20pages.
https://www.umgc.edu/current-students/learning-resources/writing-center/online-guide-to-writing/tutorial/chapter1/ch1-01#:~:text=Most%20college%20writing%20emphasizes%20the,of%20effectively%20evaluating%20those%20sources.
https://mitechnews.com/guest-columns/how-long-is-an-essay-in-high-school-college-and-university/#:~:text=At%20a%20university%2C%20students%20typically,count%20could%20exceed%208%2C000%20words.
https://writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/college-writing/
Ask your husband if we can come in and tell him what would work best in his company. I mean, we all use tech, I’m sure it’s not THAT difficult.
Good responses! I’ve got to add mine now! 😉 I aim to teach my students to think for themselves regardless of whatever opinions are presented to them. In this case, I think the IT husband may be thinking he understands education better than his NMHS partner. I think he should get a quick sub license and put his time & particular intellect where his easy argument is. I think he’ll gain a much better appreciation of the teaching profession, and more importantly, he’ll understand where his future employees are coming from. Meanwhile, he’s just another armchair quarterback in a game he doesn’t truly understand.
... he thinks that we are wasting our time teaching students to write academic research papers. His point is that, while it is often that employees in different fields need to communicate in short pieces of writing, there are other ways for students to demonstrate competency in researching, evaluating sources, and synthesizing information in longer projects. For instance, the vast majority of our students do not read articles in order to get information; they watch videos. He asks why not have them create videos to communicate the results of their research, rather than writing an academic research paper?
It is true that our daughters' experiences in college included very few academic papers, so we really can't say that all college-bound students need to know this in order to succeed. If they do need to write such papers, they can learn in college. (My daughters' colleges had entire semester freshman English classes on this skill.)
He points out that saying, "We do this because we have always done this," only serves to make us irrelevant in this ever-changing world, particularly now that AI tools can do a lot of student writing for them.
I have been searching and working on ways to engage students more fully and to avoid AI doing all their work for them. I do agree that doing presentations of sorts (whether speeches, interviews, etc.) could be valid demonstrations of abilities to organize and synthesize research results, and there is a Common Core set of standards for "Speaking and Listening." But can we really let go of the formal academic research paper as a requirement?
What do you think?
I am on the fence. While I agree that teaching lengthy research paper writing isn’t necessarily a skill my students will use outside of grad school, I believe that teaching them to use APA helps them to learn to read academic papers. However, I am also a proponent of the video presentation and have students create a screencast of at least one paper per semester to discuss their process and what they learned.