[Ohiogift] Laura Arandes (five paragraphs)

[Will Fitzhugh]

	The ten of us shuffled into the tiny classroom, anxious and shy at this first meeting of our required freshman expository writing course. Awkwardly avoiding eye contact with the other students, I pulled out a notebook and began to scribble down every rapid-fire detail of course administration our preceptor was describing. As he began listing our paper requirements, I looked around to see if anyone else was going to ask for the obvious piece of information he had forgotten to mention, and, seeing no takers, fulfilled my freshman-week resolution to be bold and courageous by raising the question myself.


	“Um…excuse me, but…,” I spluttered, “You said our first paper is ‘four to five’; that’s what? Paragraphs?” 	


	The dreaded awkward pause ensued. My classmates began looking at each other, confirming the humor in the situation—and my ignorance. The stifled titters became laughs, and soon the entire room, including my preceptor, had erupted in great mirth. Seeing him join in the hilarity opened everyone else right up, and the atmosphere in the room relaxed as we proceeded, quickly changing topics after my preceptor wryly smiled at me and pronounced: “Pages. That’s four to five pages.”


	Well, great. Glad to take one for the team and warm up the crowd. Or at least, that’s what the strong, bold and courageous part of me struggled to assure myself. But the sensible, and somewhat bitter part of me (I do confess, the larger part at that moment) wanted to desperately exclaim “How was I supposed to KNOW that?”


	I had never written more than five paragraphs for any essay or paper in my entire academic career prior to entering university. Not one. Now, I tell you, I wrote one fine five-paragraph essay, but no one ever told me that would become a completely worthless skill after Advanced Placement exams were done and your high school GPA was calculated. No one ever thought to mention to me that the college papers I had been warned about would be quantitatively and substantively vastly different from the little expository essay with its introduction, conclusion, and three body paragraphs.


	I thought a required freshman writing course was meant to introduce us to college paper-writing. To ease us into the more rigorous scholastic environment we had so recently entered. In reality, the course was a refresher for most of the other students in the class. At a high-level academic institution, too many of the students come from private schools that have realized that it would be an academic failure on their parts to send their students to college without experience with longer papers, research environments, exposure to non-fiction literature, and knowledge of bibliographic techniques. And they’re right. It is a failure, one being perpetrated by too many public high schools across the nation.


	It took me two years to gain a working knowledge of paper-writing, to get to a point where I was constructing arguments and using evidence to support them. I read pamphlets and books on the mechanics of writing college papers, but the reality is simple: you only learn how to write papers by WRITING them.  So here I am, about to graduate, with a GPA much lower than it should be and no real way to explain to graduate schools and recruiting companies that I spent my first semesters just scraping by. And the amount of determination, energy and devotion it took to scrape by isn’t easily quantified and demonstrable.


	This lack of forethought on the part of high school educators and administrators is creating a large divide among college graduates—and it’s one that helps neither the students nor their alumni institutions. Modern public high schools have an obligation not to simply pump out graduates at the end of the year, but also to prepare their students for the intellectual rigors of college.


	Or at least to teach them how to keep their mouths shut on the first day of class.

Laura Arandes was a member of the Class of 2005 at Harvard College
She attended a public high school in California
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