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by iaaan
1334 days ago
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> The first one is focused more on the fundamentals of close reading and analysis. The writer needs to understand what the theme of "chaos" means ... I think what ends up happening in reality, at least, in my experience, is that you Google "Slaughterhouse Five chaos" and trawl the first several pages of results looking for information you can essentially copy+paste into your essay (with slight adjustments to get around automatic plagiarism scanners, of course). I did still demonstrate some kind of skill, maybe research and the ability to condense information from many sources down into a single piece of work, but those weren't the skills you mention, and it was definitely not what the teacher was intending for me to do. The second prompt the person you responded to runs into the same issues (I can Google "Slaughterhouse Five reviews"), but at the very least probably feels like a more engaging and compelling essay prompt to the student. |
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The second prompt would have sent me spinning, panic, want to run.
The first prompt, while being 'technical' and not what a future 'writer' would like to do at that point can be somewhat mechanically achieved and while I still wouldn't have liked it, I would begrudgingly do it and it probably helped me overall. It mentions using certain 'techniques' you would've learned about in class. I can apply that. They want a specific number of pages at minimum so that I don't just write 5 sentences to cover the 5 examples, sure, whatever.
Like learning math. You gotta learn the basics, learn the multiplication tables by heart. Do the same "compute (-7^2*13-7)+5/5" style exercises over and over. It teaches attention to detail and memorizing and following simple rules. If you can't do that it is very unlikely that a "closer to reality" question that someone that will later go on to become a mathematician would like working on instead would not send you into panic mode.