"SCAR" ESSAYS

 “SCAR” ESSAYS

Two HS Seniors:
22 August 2022

East Coast:

        …Even though I am very grateful for the boarding high school education I received, I have to admit that there are some problems with the teaching of English at [Prep School]. The most serious of these is the development of so-called “scar literature.” At our school, there was an unwritten rule: if your essay was about a flaw/regret/tragedy in your life, you were more likely to get recognition. A narrative essay about experiencing social injustice might score half a letter grade more than an essay chronicling a meaningful outing with your parents—even if they’re on par in terms of writing skills. Teachers may legitimize the lower score by saying “the storyline is not exciting enough,” but that still doesn’t change the fact that there are story themes that have a natural advantage in inspiring empathy in readers—though the whole point about writing class is far from “who has the saddest story.” As a result, students spend all their writing assignments trying to traumatize their experiences, and little time improving their actual skills. And when it comes to college and narrative [personal] writing is no longer as important, many students are overwhelmed.

    Regarding what you pointed out correctly in your article, Mr. Fitzhugh, it is common in private high schools to also assign shorter academic papers. Although each of our history classes has only twelve students, having to correct three essays/papers per trimester per student can be quite challenging for teachers who teach multiple classes at the same time. As a result, teachers often choose the alternative of primary source analysis, requiring students to write a three-pager or less, using only the documents covered in class. Obviously, this is a far cry from a paper that meets the requirements of The Concord Review. Therefore, it was difficult for students to practice the ability to construct arguments in-length and to gather information independently from outside sources. In the last trimester of eleventh grade, the final project for the required U.S. History course is a twenty-page paper on the topic of a student’s choice—but the lack of proper writing training from English classes or history classes is a huge struggle for many of my peers. So even though private high schools like [Prep School] place more emphasis on academic papers than public high schools, there is indeed still a long way to go in terms of college preparation…


West Coast:

        …Secondly, although I am not an international student, in some ways our educational experiences mirror each other. I attended private school for primary school and public school for high school. I am familiar with the Chinese college entrance exam but do not have first-hand experience with it. However, I have lots of first-hand experience with the “scar literature” you mentioned in your letter. Personal narrative writing is emphasized in America, to the detriment of academic writing. Instead of classes focused on the college entrance exam as in China, English in American public high schools is focused on the college essay. Teachers encourage students to be more personal in their writing, emphasizing their “trauma,” their identity, or oppression (whether real or perceived). In one English class, we were given the assignment to write about “a time we felt oppressed as a result of a facet of our identity.” Predictably, students with identities and experiences that lent themselves to that type of narrative received high marks, while the admittedly, more privileged students’ grades suffered. As a result of this focus on personal narrative writing and the emphasis on trauma, public school students do not know how to write academically at all—I learned this first hand when I taught a course at my high school which emphasized academic writing…