Now, while the posts here don’t reflect this, I will totally advocate for the five-paragraph essay. Totally. I’m a huge proponent of structure. Granted, once I have my structure, things go crazy. But when I need to get a point across, I fall back on the five-paragraph.

As I get older, I appreciate my education more. It was incredible, and I think I was very lucky. And if you feel this way…I’ve recently discovered that those “boxtops for education” things are truly used by schools to raise money. The mother and her student council collect these to support programs. Your local schools would appreciate the effort. If you don’t know a school, I do…

The good ones were truly awesome. The bad ones were mostly about going to Wisconsin Dells or about Kevin Garner, who was some sports star I didn’t know but knew pretty well after reading about how these fifth graders looked up to him.

Anyway, the experience is why I never entered contests. Unless all the judges are on the same page (we professional scorers call it “calibration”) there is no validity to them.

I ran a contest once, and tried to calibrate my judges. They all rebelled.

As an English teacher, I can say this. I’ve graded hundreds of the worst essays I’ve ever seen. They bore me out of my mind. I shudder to think of what the SAT people must go through.

Give me fiction any day!

If reading was supposed to be so wonderful, then why did the teacher keep confiscating my books for reading when I was supposed to be doing something else? Or get chastized for reading ahead in my textbooks out of boredom?

Somewhere in early elementary school, I encountered the SRA Reading Labs. http://www.mcgraw-hill.co.uk/sra/rl_choice.html

They’re basically a box full of color-coded “story cards” with a “story” on one side, and some reading comprehension questions on the other side. These were assigned as a sort of extra credit option during less-structured time; students could work their way through the box and get some sort of credit for having completed a “color unit”.

This hsould have been ideal for a child like me, who would read scraps of newspaper found on sidewalks if I’d finished the books I was carrying with me. But there was a big catch: you HAD to start from the beginning of the box. You weren’t allowed to pick a starting point somewhere that matched your reading level; you had to start with “See Spot Run”. Since I was already tackling grown-up books, I naturally refused to lower myself to such “boring” stuff. My textbooks were more interesting, and library books even better.

At some point partway through the year I began reading the cards – at least the advanced ones – just for osmething to read. Examining the whole thing a little more closely at that point, I realized that the teacher had no records of our work; she would accept any color of cards for credit. I looked over the shoulder of the next bright kid to see what color cards she was reading, and started turning those in. My grades improved. This may not have been the first time I realized the system was flawed and manipulable, but it certainly wasn’t the last, to the crying shame of my academic records.