The underlying story I sense in this essay is a smart and motivated teacher slowly being corrupted by the unfixable system around him.
> I’m dealing with generalizations that don’t apply to each individual student. But class requires some level of generalization...
Yup, there's your problem right there. School is a one-size-fits-none system.
Of course you're going to get rambling pointless essays if you force kids to write when they have no interest in writing. Of course you'll get something slightly more coherent if you give very precise directions about things like thesis statements. All they have to go on is your directions -- they have no internal motivation at all.
Maybe this whole painful process gives them a tiny bit of useful practice assembling ideas. But the side effects are often terrible: a permanent distaste for reading, writing, and challenging thinking.
I don't think "corrupted" is fair. Like any startup, teachers face constraints. Those constraints are not under their control; so you try to do the best thing that you can given those constraints.
That's like saying that a startup is being "corrupted" because they have to live under the constraints of the DMCA (and perhaps soon, SOPA). Do you think a startup has enough money to buy legislators the way Hollywood would? Do you think the VC's would think that was a good use of their investor's resource if they did? No, instead the startup would be urged to adapt and overcome the constraints of where the reality which surrounds them, and to pivot, if necessary. Would you call that "corruption"? I wouldn't. It's just the reality of what we all have to do.
Heck, engineers have to do the same thing. We make tradeoffs, and we work within the world that we live in --- not the world as we would wish it to be. Maybe by doing that, we can change the world, by fixing one small problem at a time --- just as teacher can change the world, one student at a time...
> I’m dealing with generalizations that don’t apply to each individual student. But class requires some level of generalization...
Yup, there's your problem right there. School is a one-size-fits-none system.
Of course you're going to get rambling pointless essays if you force kids to write when they have no interest in writing. Of course you'll get something slightly more coherent if you give very precise directions about things like thesis statements. All they have to go on is your directions -- they have no internal motivation at all.
Maybe this whole painful process gives them a tiny bit of useful practice assembling ideas. But the side effects are often terrible: a permanent distaste for reading, writing, and challenging thinking.