Grade 12 Creative Writing: Ten Model Compositions

Ten model essays of about two hundred and fifty words - the length an Advanced Level General English answer runs to. Seven argue a position and three reflect on something that happened.

One rule was followed throughout: no national statistics. An essay that leans on a figure teaches pupils to quote numbers they cannot check, and a figure invented under examination pressure costs more than it gains. The evidence in these is observation and reasoning, which is what a candidate actually has in the hall.

Ask any parent in my town what they want for their child and English will be in the first three answers. Ask what they mean by it and the answers scatter. That gap is worth examining, because we are all pursuing something we have not defined.

For some, English is a job requirement, and they are simply right. A great many advertised positions ask for it, often for work in which very little English is actually used. The requirement functions less as a skill test than as a filter.

For others, English is respect. A person who speaks it is spoken to differently in a bank, a hospital and a government office. This is the part nobody puts in writing and everybody has seen.

The difficulty is that these two wants pull in different directions. English as a job requirement means functional competence - emails, telephone calls, instructions understood the first time. English as respect means accent and confidence, which are far harder to teach and far more easily faked.

Our teaching mostly serves neither. A pupil who has spent eleven years on grammar exercises can name a tense and cannot ask a stranger for directions.

If we are honest about which of the two we are aiming at, the teaching follows. Functional English is teachable in a classroom with forty pupils and no equipment. The other thing is not, and pretending otherwise is why so many leave school having studied English for a decade and unable to use it.

Nobody warns you that the Advanced Level is not a harder version of the Ordinary Level. It is a different activity with the same furniture.

In the first week our chemistry teacher said something I did not understand at all, and then said it again in a different way, and I understood it. In the second week the same thing happened and I did not understand it the second time either. That was new. At O/L I had never met a sentence I could not eventually memorise my way past.

The class itself is smaller - eleven of us, instead of sixty-one - and that changes everything. There is nowhere to hide. If I have not read the chapter, the teacher knows within four minutes, and not because she is checking.

The other change is time. There is a great deal of it and none of it is organised for you. At O/L the timetable did the deciding. Now there are free periods, and a free period is a test of something the school has never taught us.

I have wasted most of them so far. I say that plainly because pretending otherwise would make this essay useless.

What I have worked out is small but it is real: I understand a chapter when I can explain it to somebody who has not read it, and not before. Reading it four times proves nothing. Saying it once out loud proves everything.

The complaint is familiar: young people cannot read any more, and the telephone is to blame. I read more words in a day than my father did at my age, so the complaint as stated is plainly false. Something has changed, though, and it is worth naming accurately.

What has changed is not the quantity of reading but its shape. A page of print asks you to hold an argument in mind for three or four minutes. A feed asks you to hold nothing at all, because the next item is unrelated to the last. Both are reading. Only one builds the habit of following a thought that does not immediately reward you.

I notice this in myself when I study. A dense paragraph produces a physical impatience that has nothing to do with difficulty - I understand it, I simply want it to be over. That impatience is learned, and I did not have it three years ago.

In fairness, the feed has given us things the book could not. I have read writing by people whose books would never have reached my town, and arguments from three countries about the same event on the same morning. That is a real gain and the people who complain rarely admit it.

The honest conclusion is not that one is good and one is bad. It is that the two train different muscles, and school is now the only place where the slower one is trained at all. That makes what happens in a literature period more important than it was, not less.

The free university system is the one thing about our country that almost everybody defends, and the defence is usually made badly - by feeling rather than by argument. It deserves better, because it is defensible.

The case against it is serious and should be stated properly. Places are limited and demand is not, so a system that is free at the point of use still excludes the great majority who do not get in. Worse, the pupils who do get in are disproportionately those whose families could afford years of private tuition. Public money therefore subsidises the best-prepared, which is not what free education was for.

That is a real objection and it is an argument for reform, not for fees.

The reason fees would not fix it is that the barrier they would remove is not the barrier that is doing the damage. A bright child in my district is lost long before university - at the Grade 5 examination, or when a school has no chemistry teacher for two years, or when a mother goes abroad and the eldest daughter starts cooking. Charging that child's more fortunate classmate would not reach her.

So the question is placed wrongly when it is asked as free or paid. The money and the attention belong earlier, in the schools that feed the system rather than the institution at the end of it.

Defend free education by all means. But defending it while ignoring the schools is defending a door while the corridor to it is collapsing.

There are three ways to earn a living in my village: the paddy, the government, or leaving. Everybody in my class knows this, and nobody says it at home.

I am in the science stream, which means I have already chosen the third. There is no laboratory work here and no employer who needs it. If the results are good I will go to a university in another province and then to a city, and I will come back for New Year and funerals.

What makes this uncomfortable is not the leaving. It is that the village paid for it. My primary teacher stayed after school for nothing. The temple gave books. When my father was ill the lane found money in four days without being asked. Every one of those people knows they were investing in somebody's departure, and they did it anyway.

People talk about the brain drain as though it were a betrayal. From the inside it looks less like betrayal and more like the plan working exactly as intended.

I do not have a clean answer. I know that my going will help my family and will take one more educated person out of a place that has few. Both of those are true and neither cancels the other.

The least I can do is be accurate about it. I am not going away to serve the village. I am going because there is nothing here for what I have been trained to do, and the people who trained me knew that first.

Our school society organised a shramadana at the district hospital in the August holidays: fourteen pupils, two teachers, one Saturday, and the job of clearing and painting the boundary wall of the children's ward.

I went because a friend was going. I want to record that honestly, because the essays about volunteering always begin with somebody wanting to serve, and that was not my reason.

The work was unglamorous. The first three hours were not painting but removing what was behind the wall - bottles, bags, a bicycle frame, and a great deal of broken glass that had to be picked out by hand. Nobody had photographed that part when the society advertised the event.

What changed my view was not the painting. It was a nurse who came out at about eleven with tea for all of us and said that she had asked for the wall to be cleared four times. The problem had never been that nobody cared. It was that nobody whose job it was had a Saturday and fourteen people.

I had assumed, without examining it, that neglected places are neglected because of indifference. Mostly they are neglected because the people who mind are already working.

The wall is yellow now and it will need doing again in three years. We did not solve anything.

But I stopped being a person who thinks a problem is explained once somebody has been blamed for it, and that is a larger change than a wall.

Almost every pupil in my class attends private classes, including the pupils who are taught the same subject by the same teacher in school. Stated plainly like that, the system is obviously strange. Lived from inside, it feels unavoidable, and understanding why is more useful than condemning it.

The usual accusation is that teachers teach badly in school in order to sell classes in the evening. I have had eleven teachers this year and I believe that of none of them. The truth is duller. A syllabus written for a certain number of periods meets a school year that loses weeks to examinations, sports meets, holidays and absent staff, and the arithmetic does not work. The private class is where the missing weeks are bought back.

That explains it. It does not excuse what follows.

What follows is that a pupil's results now depend on a payment, and everybody has agreed to stop noticing. A child whose family cannot pay four thousand rupees a month is not competing in the same examination as I am, whatever the paper says. We call the result merit.

There is also a cost to those of us who can pay. I am in a classroom from seven in the morning until eight at night, and I have not read a book that was not a textbook for two years. Whatever that is producing, it is not education.

The honest reform is boring: make the school year actually contain the syllabus. Nobody campaigns for that, because it sounds like nothing.

My grandfather had a stroke in February. The speech went and most of the right side went with it.

He had been a talker. He read three newspapers and argued with all of them. In the first weeks after he came home from hospital he tried to speak and produced sounds that were not words, and then he stopped trying in front of visitors.

The therapy was in the town, twice a week, and my mother took him on the bus because a three-wheeler twice a week was not possible for a year. He worked at it the way he had done everything, which is to say stubbornly and without complaining.

By August he had about forty words. He has more now. They are not always the words he wants, and the wrong word arrives with complete confidence, which is the cruellest part of it.

What I did not expect is how much he communicates without them. He has a particular way of tapping the arm of the chair twice that means he disagrees, and every one of us knows it.

I used to think of language as the thing that carries a person's mind to other people. Watching him has taught me it is one of several vehicles, and not the one we notice losing.

He still gets the newspaper every morning. He reads it slowly and he taps the chair twice, and we all know exactly what he means.

Every year somebody argues that examinations measure only memory. Every year the argument is popular and goes nowhere, and it goes nowhere because it is half true and offered as though it were wholly true.

What an examination genuinely measures is performance under time pressure with no help available. That is a real skill and it is not nothing: a doctor deciding in four minutes, an engineer checking a figure at midnight. The people who dismiss examinations rarely explain what they would put in place that could be marked fairly for hundreds of thousands of candidates by people who do not know them.

That last condition is the one the critics skip. Coursework and continuous assessment measure more of what matters, and they measure it through a teacher who can be pressured, and a family who can pay somebody to help. An anonymous three-hour paper is crude precisely because it is incorruptible.

So the fair criticism is not that examinations measure the wrong thing. It is that we allow them to measure the only thing. A pupil who cannot write quickly under pressure is judged to have understood nothing, and we all know pupils of whom that is untrue.

The sensible position is unexciting again: keep the anonymous paper, and stop treating it as a complete account of a person. That means universities looking at more than one number, and it means adults stopping the habit of asking a seventeen-year-old what their results were as though it settled the question of who they are.

Mr Wijesuriya has farmed the two acres behind our house for thirty-one years, and he decides when to sow by watching the sky. For most of those years that worked.

He says now that the rain has stopped keeping its appointments. Not that there is less of it - that it comes in the wrong weeks and then comes all at once. Three years ago he sowed on the day he had sowed for a decade and it did not rain for five weeks. Last year it rained so hard in the third week that the seed was washed into the drain.

I am careful about what I claim from this. One farmer's thirty-one years beside one field is not evidence about a planet, and an essay that turns his observation into a statistic would be dishonest.

But it is evidence about something. It is evidence that the knowledge he holds - which is real knowledge, built by repetition and unwritten - is losing its predictive value, and that nothing is being offered to replace it. He cannot read a forecast in English. The one on the radio covers a province, and his decision is about a field.

The public argument about the climate is conducted between people who will read about the consequences. The decisions are being made by people watching the sky at five in the morning with no better information than their grandfathers had.

Whatever else is required, that gap is closeable now, and closing it needs no international agreement at all.

• Find the thesis sentence in each one. It is usually at the end of the first paragraph. An essay whose position cannot be located in one sentence has not got one.
• Find the concession. Every argument here gives the other side its best point, in full, and then answers it. This is the difference between an essay and a complaint.
• Count the paragraphs, then the words per paragraph. Two hundred and fifty words is four or five paragraphs. Pupils who write nine have written a list.
• Make them argue the opposite side of one of these. Fifteen minutes, spoken, no notes. It exposes immediately whether they understood the argument or memorised it.
• Discuss the no-statistics rule with them openly. Candidates lose credibility on invented figures more often than teachers realise, and reasoning is always available.