Why Johnny Can't Write a Term Paper.

Joanne Jacobs passes on a Jay Matthews article about kids not ready for college writing because they have never written long papers.

Now, when nearly every student is expected to go to college, they spend more time writing personal essays in journals than they learning how to research and write a college-level paper.

I see the same thing up here in the mountains. I'm not sure that it's laziness or reluctance on the part of the teachers - grading a fifteen-page paper is actually much easier than grading ten page-and-a-half short ones.

I think part of the reason may lie in the detail-oriented, bite-sized education our State DOE is pushing. Standards list the many things those English faculty should be doing. There is emphasis on touching every kind of writing instead of trying to master any one long-form type. We have "writing across the curriculum" which strives to get every teacher writing in their curricular area.

Calvin has a piece of it, too. Some teachers are too full of themselves to do something as pedestrian as a research paper. I won't even discuss the puerile drivel of a book report.

Math teachers (Hi!) try to avoid set pieces and stick to paragraph-sized explanations. If you push us (and many principals do), we'll do the useless 1-page biography of a math person. Since we're not comfortable grading such, the students aren't pushing their envelope and it's a useless exercise. I try to do 30-word abstracts of Scientific American articles - that's tough - but it's not research. I don't have time to divert them from parabolas to writing papers. Besides I want them to write Math, not words.

History teachers are doing 1- to 2-page factual "research papers" at the longest. Answer this question or explain that, but not much more. Science teachers are doing lab reports, lazy science teachers have them fill out pre-printed ones.

Because the non-fiction is being done elsewhere, I think the English teachers are pushing essays and creative writing. If they go anywhere else, it's journalism.

Is this wrong? I don't think so. I think the only way to really bring out the research paper is to put it alongside senior English ...

Years ago, my school had a "Senior Seminar" class that consisted of SAT/English prep, college essay and application writing and, for the third trimester, a 30-page research paper. This seminar was a graduation requirement in addition to 12th grade English. I've been trying to get it implemented at my current school, but no dice.

My thought is that the process can't be relegated to a single week of an otherwise busy English class. There is too much to be done for it to be anything less than the sole point of 3 months of class. Notes, research, outlines, drafts, false starts and restarts, time management. In the incarnation of twenty years ago, the teacher had a list of topics from which to choose, already had a (minimal) list of books that would be appropriate, and basically knew the topics well enough to recognize cheating and/or plagiarism. She didn't just drop them in the deep end and cackle evilly, she had the time and the resources to work through the whole process. Even the ESL kids here on I20 visas, the remedial kids who read very slowly, and the the lazy kids all had enough teacher time to do it right.