Profile of Educational Experience and Persuasive Essay About the Educational System

Related Readings: John Gatto’s “Why Schools Don’t Educate,” Darryl Robinson’s “I Went to Some of D.C.’s Best Schools, I Was Still Unprepared for College,” Hunter Rawling’s “ College Is not a Commodity,” “Jennine Capo Crucet’s “Taking My Parents to College,” Student Essays: Edison King’s “ A Cure for the Deadliest Disease” and Elham Hussein’s“The Clash of Education and Culture” and readings from unit 1 (literacy narrative) that may apply.

Topic: This essay will be part profile of your educational experience and part persuasive essay about our educational systems.

 

Required Research: You will have two research tasks for this essay:

• You will write about your educational experiences.
• You will read articles related to education for class, and you must use at least one of these articles in your essay. You may agree with, disagree with, or otherwise complicate the article using your educational history. This essay does NOT require additional research sources.   

Writing Process: (You can use information from your essay “Why I Chose QCC.”)

 

1. What are your experiences with school? Write down as much as you can – including full sentences that might work well as quotations in your essay.

 

2. Use a story related to your decision to come to college. Why are you coming to college? What are your goals? What specific challenges do you think you will encounter? Tell this story with detail.

 

3. Review the education articles we have read and discussed in class. Which of them are most relevant to your story? Reread and annotate the article(s) you choose. Take notes and highlight strong sections in the sources you may want to quote. 

 

4. Freewrite on what you have taken away from your chosen articles (your secondary research) and how it informs or helps you to write your mini biography of your schooling. 

 

5. Write a preliminary outline for how you will organize your essay (see below for a sample).

 

6. Draft and edit the essay 

1. Introduce yourself and report an interesting experience of you and school.

 

2. Then relate a story about your decision to come to college. What are your goals? What specific challenges do your think you will encounter? Tell this story with detail, and if possible, include a quotation.

3. After discussing your experience and studying the related readings what point can you make about your educational experience? State your thesis at the end of this paragraph.

1. Introduce the secondary source article you have chosen that supports your thesis.

2. List its arguments and a few of its pieces of evidence (Summary). Include at least two quotations from your secondary research sources.

1. Return to your story.  How does your story relate to the article? 

2. What idea/s in the article might be most useful to you. Explain. (State the idea in the article and explain how it relates to your experience.) Compare / contrast your experiences with the evidence / argument in the article.

Paragraph 4  Conclusion

1. End your essay by returning to you and school.

a. If you have been writing about a problem with the educational system, consider proposing possible solutions. 
b. If you have been writing about a positive feature of schooling, consider ways that many students can adopt or benefit from it.