Leaving aside the fact that your two examples assess a pretty different set of skills, one has to deal with the reality that every teacher has many students. It's simply not realistic to expect them to do "a thorough investigation" of every student's style and "voice." Imagine you have 50 students across two classes, each turning in one of these essays. How long are you going to spend on each one? 5 minutes? That's 4 hours of grading time. 15 minutes? 12 hours. Now consider that most of your school day is already occupied with teaching, prepping for classes, office hours, and other responsibilities.
I'll go further and ask "what if their 'voice' is just bad"? Just because I have a 'voice' doesn't mean it's necessarily good. Teaching students to be able to switch voices - some voices/styles are more appropriate for some types of communications than others. Recognizing these types, and being able to switch... that seems like it would be a thing to teach/learn. My early schooling was a long time ago, and I don't think I had the language to categorize all of this at that time, but I do have memories of doing this sort of stuff (mostly grades 6-8 where I had the same writing teacher, but later with various classes through grade 12).
I haven't been a teacher, but I have been a TA (while a grad student with a full course load) with a substantial weekly grading burden (e.g. 30 students' problem sets a week, with 10-15 problems each, for a class introducing concepts like formal proofs and basic number theory).
So I appreciate your point.
But I also remember being a student forced to churn out mindless formulaic essays with length and structure requirements. I hated it. I never liked writing until I finally had one good English teacher in high school who assigned and graded in the way you say is infeasible.
If a teacher doesn't have the bandwidth/capacity/skill/etc. to teach English well, maybe they should find something else to do instead of torturing students with mind-numbing assignments.
> 50 students across two classes, each turning in one of these essays. How long are you going to spend on each one? 5 minutes? That's 4 hours of grading time. 15 minutes? 12 hours.
Teachers with fifty students shouldn’t be assigning essays. There is no way for them to read them, which means they’ll grade by scanning for key words. That destroys the pedagogical value of an essay, this post’s point.
> the problem isn't so much with the assignment, but with the idea that assignments only have value if they are graded
There's grading and evaluating. Writing something you know won't be read, except for the purpose of being scolded for missing key words, is close to useless pedagogically. Someone motivated enough to learn from that (a) didn't need the assignment and (b) deserves better.
This! People learn differently - which IMHO schools don't usually account for - but I personally always learned best when putting something to paper (well, preferably the keyboard).
At my university, assignments were primarily used for guided learning - most of the grade came from the exam. If you cheat on the learning, you either don't _need_ to learn to pass the exam (meaning you should have a way to fast track), or you're asking to fail the exam, which hurts no one but yourself.
Maybe it's different in other schools? Cause I don't fully get the "Good." argument based on my experience. YMMV.
Sure— It's not at all tenable right now for teachers to provide in-depth critique on long essay assignments— that doesn't make critiques with avoiding, it makes long essay assignments worth avoiding.
I took a very difficult gatekeeper exposition class at a famously rigorous university a few years ago and loved it. We had to write a ton, but I didn't mind it because when you're learning to write, you need to write a ton. And boy did we. But not all classes there were like that! Some classes, mostly classes about writing were deemed "writing intensive," but others would require little more than a few pages here and there. The standard for that scant output extremely high and the intellectual critique was often blistering; the teacher concentrated on the subject matter instead of combing 50 paragraphs for split infinitive.
Currently, I attend a significantly less rigorous university as a full-time undergrad. I have 5 classes, including an elective on the history of a particular art form. The final will be a 10 page paper and 20 minute presentation preceded by a 2 page proposal. While this class requires significantly less written output than the exposition class, the assignment will still take an disproportionate amount of my time. The teacher has many students and no TA, so each paper will receive a cursory intellectual critique, but primarily graded on format and grammar. I'll not likely have learned more than if I'd written a really tight 2/3 page paper that got several serious critiques along the way.
All acts of deliberate writing can be examined for clarity, concision, fulfillment of their own purpose, etc. If the purpose of an essay is to teach writing, then the writing should be inspired and flow freely. It's only after someone can read and write competently that it's important for them to learn mold their writing for specific, dry purposes.
The second half of your argument is incredibly common, although I don't begrudge you for making it. Yes, it's true that teaching effectively and creatively is near-impossible given the current setup and demands of the modern education system. This should tell most people something about the worthiness of the modern system, but instead most of them defend it.
In that case, we can further automate this process and just leave humans out of it - pipe the student's generated essay back in, emit grade, done.
This reminds me of a moment that has stuck with me for a long time. Some time in the early 00s, I was wondering around town with a friend fairly late at night. We watched a waste truck picking up outside a building, there were stacks of Yellow Pages piled up, as they had just been delivered everywhere, like they used to.
My friend and I joked that they could have saved on transport and fuel by backing up the recycling trucks directly to the printing presses.
Reminds me of phone trees with a robotic voice telling to to press 1 for X, 2 for Y etc. When Google announced their automated phone tree handling, I thought, it's just two robots talking to each other over an imperfect medium, human language. Why not just connect the two systems together via API or something?
