While many of my colleagues–in various disciplines–are fond of chiding their first-year students to “grow out of” the five-paragraph form, I encourage mine to embrace the five-PART form, in which they have a three-part body, one that encourages dialectical thinking, provides room for debate and an analysis of first assumptions, and so on. While it’s not the only way to structure an essay, it’s a good way to begin thinking about the relationship between WHAT you want to write and HOW you’re going to do it.

(This conviction began in grad school when, looking over Ph.D. dissertations in the library, I noticed that many of them contained five chapters. Spooky, but true: five dies hard!)

I suppose nationwide adoption of the IB curriculum (K-12) would be too simple a solution.

Sigh.

We’re also suffering from a very limited viewpoint, fostered under No Child Left Behind, of what counts in terms of research on literacy. Fortunately, the new Education Administration seems to take a broader view of learning outcomes and research, and some changes in assumptions may soon appear. We’ll see. I’m hopeful that we can actually be able to think about, and engage with, the kinds of pedagogies that give students a full complement of tools, rather than just the hammer.

First, you are too kind. (But I still have my copy, too.)

Of course I agree with everything you say, almost. But I have the feeling that, having been away from American schooling for a very long time, I am missing some context. You make it sound as if the *only* kind of essay-writing students do is 5-paragraph essays, which makes me believe that you are arguing against a practice, common in American schools, in which the only essay-writing students do is 5-paragraph essays. If this is the case, I am of course completely on your side of the argument. I wouldn’t defend, either, making sonnets the sole form of poetry studied in school. Nor would I support a music program in which students never play anything but scales.

But is this really what goes on?

I use the 5-paragraph form, sometimes, as a way to make the skeleton of a persuasive essay clear and explicit. But the vast majority of writing my students do is their own work, structured by them, as you say, in which they struggle with all the choices that writers struggle with.

I feel as if I have stumbled into a strange country in which hammers are used routinely to commit unspeakable crimes, and have naively asked, ‘What’s wrong with a hammer? It’s a pretty good tool if you need to drive nails into wood.”

Which, I guess, brings me back to bad teaching. If a carpenter were to use only a hammer to measure, saw, plane, sand, and paint, he would be a bad carpenter. But don’t blame the hammer.