A Gap in the Education System: The Benefits of Practice and Repetition

A few years ago I tutored a grade 9 student in essay writing. I asked him to write narrative essays, persuasive essays, expository essays, and literary analysis essays on different subjects. After every completed essay, we would talk about the principles of good writing based on rubrics and essay samples I found online. I’d point out where I thought I saw deficiencies in his writing. Then I asked him if he’d like to try again or move on to a different essay type. Sometimes, he said he’d like to try again (because he wanted to get it right) and sometimes he said he’d like to move on to a different essay type (when he got bored of the one we were working on). With each repetition and mini-essay, he became a little better at delivering the kind of writing that each of these essay genres required. 

I believe that it is a failure of the education system that students are rushed from one assignment to another with little opportunity to get quality feedback and repeat projects. A student will spend months reading a novel, write one literary analysis essay, make mistakes on it, and that’s it, grade 10 is over, time for grade 11. And it doesn’t make sense. As a tutor, I try to provide short readings for students to complete and short essays for them to try and write. Reasonably, if a student can do something good on a small scale, they’ll be just fine doing it on a larger one.