Inchan Hwang
Mr.Garrioch
Junior English Composition Class
19 November 2012
Why are we writing this essay? Our English writing teacher, Mr.Garrioch, says he wants something to grade us with. So, we are writing this essay as a battle against 'B'. Although our writing teacher has given us six essay options which are very intriguing and enjoyable, the faces that I'm seeing right now are desperate, frustrated faces. Why do we have a time limit for writing an essay anyways? What's the purpose of it? Do we really need to be evaluated upon our ability to quickly spark up topics to write about and ability to express our opinions within time? This ability may be useful in SAT, AP tests. However, I believe that to enhance our ability to write fully developed, insightful, and grammatically refined essays, we must write in a more liberal environment.
In this sense, I think a blog is a fine workshop to think and write with enough time and deliberation. However, something is going wrong these days. Students are not spending enough time and enough thoughts on blog postings, and some are even posting scribbles that are less than a hundred words. We stopped reading others' postings and commenting on them. As a fine evidence, not a single person has visited my blog for a whole month. I really felt as if I was writing a diary as my summer vacation homework - I know that this would be evaluated soon, but I don't necessarily have to write on this regularly and maintain the quality of the postings. I would really love to work hard on my blog. However, if nobody gives me feedbacks, how would my writing improve? I'll be making same mistakes over and over again. Also, I have tons of assignments behind me. I would rather work on my assignments for other classes before trying to write a perfectly satisfactory essay that I don't really know whether I should really be satisfied with it or not.
So, why am I, along with many other students, stopping when I reach a "good enough" level? I think it's because receiving an 'A' on all classes is so important. Frankly, who would be writing this essay with such an effort and fervor if this essay wasn't graded? We would be dozing off instead. I don't exactly know what created this atmosphere or culture where most students are motivated not by their desire to learn but by penalty points, grades, college admissions. However, I guess it's because we are so overwhelmed with our assignments. Since we all know that there are tons of incoming assignments, we are forced to rush on the assignment that we're working on right now. We are also forced to deter from pursuing our real academic interests because in order to get admitted to a "good college", we must stay "balanced" and receive A's in every class that we take. In order to do so, we choose to reinforce our weaknesses rather than to flourish our talents and aptitudes. Since reinforcing our weaknesses is such a hard job, we study the subject just as much so that we can receive an A.
Much less offensive, at least. But still, this will not get you into college, nor does it reflect any sort of significant adjustment to your course of action. I expected you to actually do the actual assignment you were supposed to do.
ReplyDelete