Grade 13 Creative Writing: Ten Model Compositions

Ten model essays of about two hundred and fifty words, written at the point where the Advanced Level examination is months away rather than years. The length is the same as Grade 12; the demand is not.

These commit to a position inside the first paragraph, waste no sentence on introduction, and several of them answer a question as it would be set on a paper rather than a topic the writer chose. As in Grade 12, no national statistics are quoted - the reasoning has to carry the essay, because in the hall that is all a candidate has.

The question is usually asked as though a rule could settle it. It cannot, because the honest answer depends entirely on what the pupil is being asked to do, and we have not sorted our assignments into the two kinds that matter.

Some school work exists to produce a document. A summary of a chapter, a list of causes, a neat paragraph on a set topic - the value is in the artefact, and a machine that produces it faster is simply a better tool, in the way a calculator is.

Other work exists to change the pupil. An essay is not wanted because the world needs another essay. It is wanted because the act of writing it forces a mind to order itself, and that ordering is the entire point. Handing that to a machine is not cheating so much as declining the lesson while attending the class.

The trouble is that these two kinds of task look identical on a worksheet, and we have been setting them interchangeably for years without noticing.

So a ban is the wrong instrument. It cannot be enforced, and enforcing it would waste the one genuinely useful tool a pupil in a school without a library now has.

What is required is duller and harder: teachers deciding, task by task, whether a given piece of work is for the document or for the pupil, and saying which. A class told why a rule exists will mostly keep it. A class told only that a rule exists will route around it by March.

A great many advertisements in this country ask for fluency in English for work in which almost no English is spoken. This is worth explaining rather than resenting, because the explanation changes what a candidate should do about it.

The first reason is genuine. Suppliers, software, manuals, regulations and the head office may all be in English, and a person who cannot read them cannot be trusted with a decision. For those posts the requirement is not a barrier, it is the job.

The second reason is that English is being used as a proxy. An employer with three hundred applications and no time reaches for something that correlates with schooling, city upbringing and confidence with strangers. English does correlate with all three. It is a lazy filter, and it is not irrational - which is exactly why it will not be abandoned because it is unfair.

The consequence for an applicant is uncomfortable but clear. Complaining about the second reason is correct and will not get anybody employed. The filter has to be passed.

The consequence for the rest of us is larger. Every year, capable people are removed from consideration for work they could do well, on a criterion nobody in the interview room could defend in writing. That is a waste the country pays for twice: once in the person's lost income, and once in the position filled by somebody less able who happened to have the language.

Neither fact is a reason to stop learning English. Both are reasons to stop pretending the requirement is always about the work.

Ask a Grade 13 class how many intend to work abroad and the hands go up before the question is finished. In my class it is most of us. The usual explanation is money, and money is in it, but money alone does not explain why the wish is held so calmly.

The calmness is the part worth examining. My parents' generation regarded going abroad as a sacrifice - something undertaken for a house or a sister's wedding, with the intention of returning. We regard it as a career step, which is a different thing entirely.

What changed is not our patriotism. It is our estimate of how long things take here. A person who watches a queue for three years stops asking whether it will move and starts asking how to get out of it. Every young person I know has a story of that kind: a certificate that took eight months, an appointment made and postponed twice, a qualified relative who waited four years for a posting.

It would be comfortable to conclude with a sentence about serving the nation. I do not believe it and neither would anybody reading this.

What I do believe is that the wish to leave is not a feeling about the country. It is a judgement about predictability, and it would be changed by nothing more romantic than institutions that did what they said within the time they said.

That is not sentimentality. It is the only thing on the list that would actually work.

The results come out at some point between four and six months after the last paper, and nobody will tell you which day. That interval is a stranger thing than the examination.

For the first fortnight I did what everybody does, which is to reconstruct the papers from memory and mark them. This is a thoroughly useless activity and I could not stop. I worked out that I had almost certainly lost eleven marks on one question, and I revisited that eleven for weeks, as though the number could still be negotiated.

Then the reconstruction stopped working, because I began to forget the questions.

What is difficult about the wait is not anxiety, exactly. It is being suspended - unable to plan, because three different futures each require a different decision, and unable to rest, because a result is coming that will be spoken about for years. My relatives have already asked twice. My mother has stopped asking, which is its own kind of pressure.

I have started working in the mornings at a computer shop in the town. It pays very little and it has been the most useful part of the wait, because it is the first thing in three years that nobody will grade.

I do not know what the results will say. I have noticed something I did not expect, though: after the first month, the person waiting is no longer the person who sat the paper, and it seems unjust that the envelope will only have news about him.

The argument for spending on buses and trains is usually made in the language of congestion, and it is the weakest form of the case. Congestion annoys the people who already have vehicles. The stronger case is about the people who do not.

Consider what a bus timetable decides. It decides which schools a child can attend, how far from home a woman can accept work, and whether a farmer's produce reaches a market or is sold at the gate for whatever is offered. A household without a vehicle has its possibilities drawn for it by somebody else's route map, and most households in this country are in that position.

The objection is real: this costs money the treasury has not got, and a new road is cheaper to announce and easier to photograph.

But the comparison is not between a bus service and nothing. It is between a bus service and the private arrangements families are already paying for in its absence - the school van, the hired three-wheeler to the clinic, the extra rent to live near a junction. That money is being spent. It is simply being spent by individuals, inefficiently, and it does not appear in any budget.

So the honest form of the question is not whether we can afford public transport. It is whether we would rather pay for mobility collectively and cheaply, or privately and dearly, given that we are certainly going to pay.

Put that way, the answer is not really in dispute.

My mother rises at half past four. By the time the rest of the house is awake there is breakfast, three lunch packets, a load of washing on the line and a kitchen that has already been cleaned once. She is not employed.

That last sentence is the one I want to examine, because every form she fills describes her that way and every form is wrong.

What she does has a market price. If she stopped, the household would have to buy roughly what she supplies: cooked food, childcare for my brother, cleaning, the management of medicines for my grandmother, and the negotiation with the school, the bank and the electricity office that occupies more of her week than anybody notices. We could not afford it. That is not an opinion, it is arithmetic.

The usual response is that this work is done out of love and should not be priced. But my father's work is also done partly out of love for us, and nobody suggests that it therefore need not be paid.

The consequence of not counting it is not merely that she goes unthanked. It is that she has no pension, no leave, no bad day to which she is entitled, and no claim on anything if the marriage or her health fails. A person who works for thirty years and accumulates no security has not been honoured. She has been quietly exposed.

Calling it love does not change the arithmetic. It only makes the arithmetic harder to raise.

They measure a part of it, accurately, and we then use the result as though it described the whole person. The error is not in the instrument. It is in what we do with the reading.

What a three-hour paper measures well is the ability to retrieve and organise knowledge quickly, alone, under pressure, in writing. It is fashionable to dismiss this as mere memory. It is not mere anything: a great deal of serious work is done exactly under those conditions, and the anonymity of the paper means it cannot be bought, which no alternative yet proposed can claim.

What it measures badly is everything that takes longer than three hours. Patience with a problem over a month. Working with people who are difficult. Judgement where the question has not been set for you. These are not minor omissions - they are most of adult competence.

The proposed remedies mostly fail on fairness rather than on principle. Continuous assessment measures more, through a teacher who knows the family and can be leaned on. Interviews reward the confident and the coached. A crude measure that cannot be corrupted may be better than a subtle one that can.

So the reform worth arguing for is not a different examination. It is refusing to let one number stand as a verdict: universities reading more than the grades, employers looking at what a person has actually done, and adults ending the habit of asking a nineteen-year-old their results as though the answer settled the matter of who they are.

The library in our town is one room above the municipal office, and you reach it by an outside staircase with a broken third step that has been broken for as long as I have used it.

Inside there are eleven shelves. Four are Sinhala fiction, two are English, one is newspapers on a wooden rod, and the rest are reference books of an age that makes some of them historical documents rather than sources. The atlas shows countries that no longer exist.

There are two tables. From nine in the morning the same four men read the newspapers, in the same order, and there is an understanding about who has which paper that has never been written down.

The librarian is a woman of about fifty who knows what every regular reader is in the middle of. When I was in Grade 9 she put a book on the corner of the table without saying anything, because she had noticed what I had returned. She has done this perhaps twenty times and she has been wrong twice.

The building is inadequate by any standard one could write down. The ceiling leaks over the reference shelf and there is no computer.

It is also the only room in eleven kilometres where a person may sit for three hours, take nothing, buy nothing, be asked for nothing, and read.

I have thought about that sentence a good deal, and I cannot find another room it is true of.

You are about to spend two years being frightened of an examination, and I cannot tell you the result, so I will tell you the four things I would have paid money to know.

First: the marks are not distributed by effort. They are distributed by effort applied to the right things, and you will spend most of Grade 10 copying notes beautifully, which feels like work and is closer to decoration. Write less and explain more, aloud, to somebody who has not read the chapter.

Second: the people who seem effortlessly clever are mostly people who started earlier or who are frightened in a quieter way than you. You will find this out in Grade 13 and it will be too late to have been comforted by it.

Third: you will lose two friendships in these two years, one by drifting and one by something you say. The second one is repairable and you will not attempt the repair for eleven months out of pride. Do it in the first week.

Fourth, and I am least sure of this: the examination matters much less than everyone around you believes and much more than the people who say so will admit. Both halves are true. Hold them together and you will neither collapse nor coast.

You will be all right. Not because of the result - I still do not know the result - but because the habit you are building of sitting down with something difficult is worth more than the paper, and nobody is going to tell you that this year.

For the last two years I have read the same day's news in Sinhala and in English, partly to improve the English and partly out of curiosity. The curiosity turned out to be the more useful reason.

The facts are usually the same. What differs is what is assumed about the reader. The English report explains the background as though the reader may be unfamiliar with it and might be elsewhere. The Sinhala report assumes the reader already knows, and spends its space on what it means for us. Neither is superior. They are written for different rooms.

The difference that matters is in what gets left out. An event that is enormous in one is a paragraph in the other, and not because of any conspiracy - because each editor knows their readers and is probably right about them.

The consequence is that two people in the same town can follow the news carefully, honestly, every day, and hold pictures of the country that do not overlap. When they disagree, each assumes the other is not paying attention. Both are paying close attention to different accounts.

I do not conclude from this that everybody should read two languages; most people have neither the time nor the second language. I conclude something narrower and more troubling. The common ground we assume exists - the shared set of facts that a disagreement can be conducted across - is smaller than we think, and nobody is responsible for maintaining it.

That is not a language problem. It is what makes it hard to fix.

• Read only the first paragraph, then stop. Ask the class to predict the rest. If they can, the essay is properly structured; if they cannot, it is not.
• Time a full one at thirty-five minutes, including planning and checking. That is the real constraint, and practising without it builds a habit that fails on the day.
• Mark for structure before language. A grammatically clean essay with no argument scores below a rougher one that answers the question. Say so, or they will polish the wrong thing.
• Insist on answering the question that was set. The commonest A/L failure is a good essay on the neighbouring topic.
• Have them cut a finished essay by fifty words. Nothing teaches economy faster, and it shows them which sentences were carrying nothing.