I Welcome the Death of the Five-Paragraph Essay and All Standardized Deformed Learning

I have to admit that since GenAI can easily generate a five-paragraph essay on a topic, the death of that fake writing format dies a welcome death.

Why did we teach such nonsense? In the 1990s, in all their wisdom, our policymakers and educational leaders decided that we English teachers needed to be teaching writing, (as if we were not), so they developed a writing test with standardized rubrics and all that garbage.

If you are going to measure writing effectiveness, you have to have standards to measure they said. 

But measuring writing is like measuring a sunset or a water fall or a mountain stream. Go ahead and develop your standards, but look at the deformity you create.

Naturally, when you standardize any aspect of writing, you stupefy it and create some kind of monstrosity, and in this case? The five-paragraph mutation essay.

We taught this because our educational leaders demanded it with their accountability assessments, even though in our hearts we knew that true writing can't be standardized. This is because our administrators demanded 'accountability" and wanted "high test scores" for personal boasting. They seem to always have to have those "measures" to prove their necessity.

I will acknowledge this positive outcome of GenAI and LLMs: If AI blows up anything, it can destroy this notion of standardizing educational tasks. It has always been nonsense and it still is, so go ahead GenAI  and blow it all up. 

If AI can do it, then let's finally have students engage in authentic learning tasks that AI is ill-equipped to do completely.

Of course with standardized tasks out the window, our educational leaders can no longer compare outcomes and boast of "getting those scores up" but that is a good thing. The true measure of what we learn has never fit a bubble sheet or a rubric.

Finally, unintentionally, GenAI might just, at least in this sense, make it possible to ask students learn how to do real writing, and educational leaders might have to find some other measure of their own effectiveness.