I write in an inverted pyramid style for journalism, so I usually want to get it all out in three paragraphs.

Thank goodness for rambling style columns!

I am a very, very lazy student.

I remember inverted pyramid style!

We had the five paragraph essay style totally drilled into us in middle school and high school. We would never start writing before writing an outline. I know several people who went to my high school who got to college and had no idea how to write essays any other way -- when they got assigned 10 page papers to write, they ended up writing them as five really long paragraphs.

My sister was saying she'd gotten away with this for a long time. The standard way of presenting your thesis argument, etc, and constructing an essay? Greek to both of us. We both just stumble through trying to be convincing until we reach some sort of wrap up.

This is so me. I was a disaster in university. Every paper was started the night before it was due and almost all were handed in late. I had so many "reads like a first draft comments." Occasionally, in the midst of panic and sleep deprivation, I would do something pretty smart, but that was rare. Also, because the non-existent arguments just petered out, my essays were always short of the required word count.

Theatre school was the only place I had any discipline. That was because the schedule was so punishing (six days a week (if I was lucky) and almost always a 12-hour day), I didn't dare slack off.

Oh God yes, save me from the five-paragraph essay. I have to drill it out of my students. It’s a good foundation for younger kids to learn, though, so I don’t advocate not teaching it--it’s just a bear to un-train.

Totally appropos to this conversation, it's National Day on Writing.

Oh God yes, save me from the five-paragraph essay. I have to drill it out of my students. It’s a good foundation for younger kids to learn, though, so I don’t advocate not teaching it--it’s just a bear to un-train.

All of our teachers told us to use it for the essay portion of all the AP exams, so none of the kids at my high school had to un-learn it until college. We'd been using it for the writing portion of the state tests since eighth grade or so.

[double tap]

Zombies?

I coasted all the way up to and through 8th grade, but going to a college prep all-girls Catholic high school with classmates who were also all at the tops of their K-8 schools gave me a huge wakeup call. When I didn't even graduate in the top 10% of my high school class (I was in the top 12% instead), I was devasted but no longer arrogant about my brains, like I was when I graduated from junior high.

My best friend in college coasted all the way through her BA. She got her wakeup call in her first semester of medical school; she went to UCSD, one of the top 3 programs in the country, so she was up against her intellectual peers. She called me in late September of her first year, crying her eyes out because she'd just gotten her first F of her entire life. I got her to stop her hysterical sobs and then asked her, "P, how many other people took the test?" "About 30." "How many passed?" "Well, nobody." "Don't you think that says something about the test and not about you?" "I guess..."

5-paragraph--that's 3 ideas in the opening paragraph, a paragraph for each idea, then a closing paragraph to restate your 3 ideas? That's what I remember.

I'm going to have to drag out the Cartoon Guide to Physics again and take another shot at the math elements. I may need a brush up on algebra, though, because after high school I ran shrieking from any sign of it.

I can get the concepts of physics, what forces interact with which and how, but the math proofs overwhelm me.