Monday, February 05, 2007

Julia's Cooking up a FPT


Julia Child, the famous chef, started cooking by opening The Joy of Cooking and, beginning with the basic formula of cooking, started to learn how to cook. She did not start making duck a l’orange or soufflés because those dishes required a knowledge and practice that she did not have yet. Those simple basics, as boring and formulaic as they might be, were the backbone of her cooking. Writing is a creative process, much like cooking, that requires knowledge of some basic formulas, of which the FPT is one. This basic writing formula can be used on its own in situations that require a basic 5 paragraph format, or it can be spiced up to show a wider range.
There were too many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak, with this week’s reading. Dean, Nunnally, and Novick agree in principle that the FPT is a useful recipe for students to know and if taught with “creativity and variety” like adding genre or with a “train of thought” as a unifying ingredient, can push the boundaries of the FPT. After all, is writing just using formula and convention in creative ways? We know a sonnet, a haiku, dialogue, etc. by its formula and conventions – it is the writer who stirs the ingredients together to make the formula work – or not work. A stinky sonnet isn’t rotten because its formula is a sonnet; it reeks because the writer didn’t mix it together properly. It’s not the FPT that is at fault, it’s the cook!
There are so many situations when a student must know and be able to cook up a very basic and uninspired FPT. Standardized testing does not reward “rhetorical analysis” it rewards “declarative knowledge” and as the scoring of these test becomes more automated, students who can organize and declare what they know in a formula easy to recognize and grade will be rewarded with higher scores. Whether or not we agree with the way standardized testing penalizes creativity and critical thinking, it is our responsibility, as teachers, to teach students how to write for these tests. To mix a metaphor, we need to play the cards we’re dealt. In addition, many teachers in other disciplines do not value creative FPT’s. But, if we teach our students the basics of the FTP and then teach them to add spices and zesty ingredients; they might even be able to, as Baron says, “deploy sesquipedalian words appropriately.” (Oh puleeeeeze – just say long! – and when have sesquipedalian words made a paragraph good?)
Replacing a basic recipe that has worked for years and years with a crazy new one that is more complicated and just as formulaic seems crazy to me. A formula is a formula and maybe, just maybe, we use the FPT because it works. That’s how Julia felt about her basic recipes and who would I be to argue with Julia?

The web site I'm listing is a U of St. Thomas website that gives the basic formula for FPT, compare and contrast and content driven and chronilogical essays. I know our cohort is creative enough to take these basic formulas and turn them into a delicious dish! The site is: http://www.stu.edu/organizing---structuring-your-writing-article-2119.html

1 comment:

Kerry said...

Nice analogy - way to break it down for us. Had I read your blog first I probably could have skipped the articles. Although seemingly overused, there are some benefits to the FPT.