Taking away from this weeks reading, what I found interesting and the main feature that stuck with me afterwards was how schools teach us how to write essays and how to analyse Shakespeare’s plays and Sylvia Plath’s poetry when they should be teaching us how to analyse current events and how to write more beneficial work such as business reports and briefing strategies etc.
When I think of an essay I think back to high school where Essays revolved around books and poetry we read and how we had to write 1000 words on the symbolism of blue in Sylvia Plath’s poetry and what is the meaning of the children killing Piggy in Lord of the Flies? This weeks reading touches upon beneficial teaching in high school and how when we go for jobs we don’t know how to write up a report in excel because how would we, we only learnt how to write essays in high school.
Having the ability to write an essay is good for passing your uni course and getting a good mark in VCE, but realistically having the ability to write an essay does not mean you will know how to write up a business plan for your future career.
I do agree that essays and the strict structure that you must follow whilst writing an essay, especially when in school, helps develop organised thinking and does allow us to understand and explore the ideas behind a topic, however I feel that we must keep our children up to date with the structure of todays world where we don’t write essays for work, we write reports and fact sheets and having those abilities will help us obtain jobs. Not being able to analyse poetry to the point of understanding what the double entendre is.
[…] Torika picks up some points, that other forms of writing might matter too. Perhaps, but language is the stuff we have to think with, so the essay becomes the place where thinking can and does happen. So it matters simply for that. On other hand, while the ‘traditional’ essay might help develop organised thinking for me this is precisely the problem. Why is organised thinking important? This becomes a tautological argument because it turns out organised thinking is useful if you need to write organised essays. But if you think that connection, complexity and how thickly things join is important, which you really can’t ‘organise’ (which is one of the ways in which creativity and innovation happens – they’re its ingredients if you like) then being organised isn’t so useful anymore. This matters simply because high school and then university privileges this idea of being able to ‘order’ and so those who are very smart, but have highly cluttered minds, struggle. As Einstein said (a famously disorganised thinker) “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” Written by adrianmiles Posted in commentary Tagged with history, weavings […]