The Return of the Literary Essay

The sub report yesterday left me feeling more than a little apprehensive about writing today.

“Wait…did they end up writing anything?”

“Well…they argued a lot about who picked the quotes.”

Insert eye roll emoji here

After having a little chat about my expectations when there is a sub, I discovered the root of the problem: they weren’t ready to do what I had left for them to do.

My plans: With the sub, write one body paragraph of a literary essay we were writing about a picture book. I even wrote an example for the sub to use as a guide. Then, write the next two body paragraphs independently. We had already written the thesis and chosen the quotes. Topic sentence, quotation, analysis, conclusion sentence, done.

Reality: They didn’t know what to put in a body paragraph. They had no idea how to connect the quotation to the thesis. They didn’t know how to make a topic sentence.

After doing another body paragraph together today, they were slightly more comfortable and slightly excited about trying a paragraph on their own. We ended up doing the paragraph step-by-step, with each student writing his/her own individual paragraph and sharing each step of the way. It was long, and slow, but in the end, they had each written a passable literary essay body paragraph. Success!

Moral of the story: Sometimes student misbehavior stems from inability rather than deviousness. A little teaching helps with that, plus a little more scaffolding.