"How Schools Suppress Creativity" Response

As I was reading through the first response, all I could notice were all of the syntactic, grammatical, and spelling errors. The entire piece was appalling to read, and then there were all of the positive comments of the teacher (or student who produced this dual paper, probably for Shipka). The teacher was clearly looking for nothing other than the fulfillment of a formula--ironically, the very formula described within the paper. The sad thing is I can remember teachers looking for the same things in my high school. Not only that, it continues into college. Many teachers provide peer editing sheets that are filled with questions like, "Did he refer back to his thesis in the conclusion?" or "Is the thesis statement clear? Underline it if you can." I wrote my third paper for this class on The Lively Art of Writing, and Shipka says that it is the place from which version one of this student paper came. It is absurd to me that, except for the facetious tone, everything in that "textbook" survived.

The second version of the paper had comments much closer to those of my mind, although written meaner than I would have done. Yet, if a teacher wrote these comments, she would be punished. She is cornered into looking only for the positives, and the positives are really negatives because they are simply the student's fulfillment of a formula. And the amount of mistakes within this paper are so enormous that there is nowhere to begin except to blame every teacher that preceded the commenting teacher. What scares me most is landing in the position of being a teacher that sees that kind of work. There is nothing to do. I might be able to pass on one or two concepts but it would not in reality be enough to honestly pass my class. Were it a first-year comp class, I would have to let the student pass without having a clue how to write, or I'd have to flunk her and delay her graduation as well as hurt her transcript. Would it be fair to her? Was it her fault she wrote so poorly, or is it the fault of our education system, which applauds the cookie cutter essay?