He posits that “all the students we teach have something in their lives that’s really engaging— something that they do and that they are good at, something that has an engaging, creative component to it.”

If we’re not engaging kids by allowing them to tap into the things they really care about, we’re missing tons of opportunities to prevent students from tuning out.

Maybe if I’d had a choice about what to write I wouldn’t have hated it so much and would find creative writing (including blogging) much easier, instead of just being good at regurgitating someone elses opinion.

“I will believe half of what your child tells me about home if you believe half of what your child tells you about me.”

Please, no posts about abuse or hidden agendas – this statement is made tongue-in-cheek to help parents understand that their angels sometimes exaggerate.
Kids learn to spin from an early age. They know how to make any teacher a monster.

The article is like those impossible-to-answer math problems – Not Enough Information.

It is possible that there was a brainstorming session.

It is possible that dozens of great topics were generated.

It is possible that the teacher doesn’t want to read 25 essays about ____(fill in the blank with any number of topics of interest to middle schoolers).

It is possible that the child in question had a choice to pick the topic about getting a cell phone – but being a child, she did not immediately make the connection to her home life.

This last choice is the one that we need to focus on. In education we do very little to relate what happens within the brick walls of the school to what happens in the “real world”. We need to blur these lines so children immediately see the connection.

No, it’s lying and anti-intellectual. It’s the same as companies that lie to customers to sell products; it’s deceptive marketing that willfully ignores important facts. Persuasive writing is an ugly bastion of the real goal: understanding and evaluating opposing viewpoints.

They’re similar, but dangerously so; someone skilled at persuasive writing will probably think themselves a neutral author and a similarly trained reader might naively agree….in actuality, the author is just writing to support their initial hypothesis.

When we talk about the edublogosphere being an echo chamber, that’s because everyone’s writing circles of linked persuasive essays. We should be aiming for well-informed decisions and seeking to understand the logic of those who disagree.

tl;dr: Persuasive essays = “truthiness”

An education should teach us to weigh as many considerations as possible and not make a choice until you can make a confident, well-informed choice. Encouraging hastily-written persuasive essays that aren’t allowed to evaluate opposing points is pretty clearly in direct opposition to this.

In other words, the school or teacher’s view on the issue is often clear to kids and then it is rare for them to argue the other side.

However, being able to argue any issue from a range of perspectives is a worthwhile skill.

(I cannot believe that I’m defending this)