"They teach you how to make points in clear and concise ways while supporting your arguments and tuning them to your audience"
What makes this a business writing class, it sounds exactly like Freshman English. It also sounds exactly like the term paper requirement for my literature credit elective which was sci fi, other than sci fi class additionally required we relate somehow to sci fi. It sounds like every term paper requirement I ever had to write for every class other than not being on topic...
Maybe your anecdotes were not educated the wrong way with the wrong topics, but just simply not very well educated? Half the students have to be below median and half of them will be stuck with the below-median teachers, by definition of median and assuming random distribution, and the result is likely to be some peculiar results from "educated" people. Or at least some weird anecdotes.
Its possible that for-profit business pressures at the school pushed poor teachers into creative writing instead of biz writing which got the good teachers. That may even be a universal cultural phenomena across the country, those pressures exist, math teachers really do seem as a class to be smarter than gym teachers and there are sound business reasons it has to be that way. But blaming the topic for employee results isn't going to change employee results, you'll just have more people signing up for biz writing requiring the village idiots to be reassigned from the now empty creative writing classes into biz writing, leading eventually to mysterious pondering about why biz writing class used to be great and now on average its not so good.
You can hope for an educational curriculum for poli sci but that might be a little abstract for all high school students. I suspect you'd be stuck with trivia or indoctrination, checkmark the year was Marx born, write a short answer about why America is great, who is the mayor of our city at this time, etc. Vocational poli sci would be "how to be an effective campaign manager" which might be interesting. Or just plain old "how to become a politician" class. True, very few grads will become POTUS but quite a few might end up local aldermen, board members, council members, or mayors over their lifetimes.
What makes this a business writing class, it sounds exactly like Freshman English. It also sounds exactly like the term paper requirement for my literature credit elective which was sci fi, other than sci fi class additionally required we relate somehow to sci fi. It sounds like every term paper requirement I ever had to write for every class other than not being on topic...
These are different styles of writing, emphasizing related but not fungible skills. A business writing class focuses much more heavily on being concise, persuasive, and tailoring your writing for your target audience. I wrote a lot of term papers for a lot of humanities classes in college, and these skills were only indirectly implicated, not the central focus.
Maybe your anecdotes were not educated the wrong way with the wrong topics, but just simply not very well educated?
Possible, but unlikely. Whatever the various high school rankings are worth, mine appears in the top 5/10 (in the U.S.) of most of them. The problem was the curriculum, and indirectly the teachers who brought with them a romanticized academic mindset. Your comments are essentially illustrative of that mindset: a snobbish overestimation of the importance of literature, etc, combined with rationalizations about how studying those subjects nonetheless indirectly develops relevant skills. This basic approach to education is fundamentally flawed. It's the product of PhD's in various fields who think a grade 6-12 education should consist of little tastes of a variety of those fields, and rationalize that approach by claiming that people will pick up relevant skills in the process, or "learn to learn" or something similarly vacuous.
To circle back to the writing example, there is no reason other than snobbery that literature classes are taught in grades 6-12 while business writing classes are not. Even though kids, too lost in learning about metaphors and allegories and whatnot to pick up any real writing skills, predictably graduate without being able to write effectively, it never occurs to anyone to say: "gee, if we want kids to know how to write, maybe we should teach them how to write!"
Comments
"They teach you how to make points in clear and concise ways while supporting your arguments and tuning them to your audience"
What makes this a business writing class, it sounds exactly like Freshman English. It also sounds exactly like the term paper requirement for my literature credit elective which was sci fi, other than sci fi class additionally required we relate somehow to sci fi. It sounds like every term paper requirement I ever had to write for every class other than not being on topic...
Maybe your anecdotes were not educated the wrong way with the wrong topics, but just simply not very well educated? Half the students have to be below median and half of them will be stuck with the below-median teachers, by definition of median and assuming random distribution, and the result is likely to be some peculiar results from "educated" people. Or at least some weird anecdotes.
Its possible that for-profit business pressures at the school pushed poor teachers into creative writing instead of biz writing which got the good teachers. That may even be a universal cultural phenomena across the country, those pressures exist, math teachers really do seem as a class to be smarter than gym teachers and there are sound business reasons it has to be that way. But blaming the topic for employee results isn't going to change employee results, you'll just have more people signing up for biz writing requiring the village idiots to be reassigned from the now empty creative writing classes into biz writing, leading eventually to mysterious pondering about why biz writing class used to be great and now on average its not so good.
You can hope for an educational curriculum for poli sci but that might be a little abstract for all high school students. I suspect you'd be stuck with trivia or indoctrination, checkmark the year was Marx born, write a short answer about why America is great, who is the mayor of our city at this time, etc. Vocational poli sci would be "how to be an effective campaign manager" which might be interesting. Or just plain old "how to become a politician" class. True, very few grads will become POTUS but quite a few might end up local aldermen, board members, council members, or mayors over their lifetimes.
These are different styles of writing, emphasizing related but not fungible skills. A business writing class focuses much more heavily on being concise, persuasive, and tailoring your writing for your target audience. I wrote a lot of term papers for a lot of humanities classes in college, and these skills were only indirectly implicated, not the central focus.
Possible, but unlikely. Whatever the various high school rankings are worth, mine appears in the top 5/10 (in the U.S.) of most of them. The problem was the curriculum, and indirectly the teachers who brought with them a romanticized academic mindset. Your comments are essentially illustrative of that mindset: a snobbish overestimation of the importance of literature, etc, combined with rationalizations about how studying those subjects nonetheless indirectly develops relevant skills. This basic approach to education is fundamentally flawed. It's the product of PhD's in various fields who think a grade 6-12 education should consist of little tastes of a variety of those fields, and rationalize that approach by claiming that people will pick up relevant skills in the process, or "learn to learn" or something similarly vacuous.
To circle back to the writing example, there is no reason other than snobbery that literature classes are taught in grades 6-12 while business writing classes are not. Even though kids, too lost in learning about metaphors and allegories and whatnot to pick up any real writing skills, predictably graduate without being able to write effectively, it never occurs to anyone to say: "gee, if we want kids to know how to write, maybe we should teach them how to write!"