We’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together. 
Multimodal and the real world.
and i am not talking about university life. Yes it can give young people a jump start into what the real world is actually like. Jobs, bills, educational responsibilities, etc. We know that life is multimodal. LIFE! yet classes are modal limited and rely on the standard works of figuring out what you know or if you have learned anything. If you are an English major 99% of the standard works is in the form of essays. Short in class essays, formal MLA formatted essays, average (3 page) non formal and not formatted essays. Then you have to deal with the “genre”. compare and contrast, analyze this passage, etc.
The education system in general needs an overhaul. In Junior high they begin to teach you the essay. They say it will prepare you for the future, and by future they mean high school. In high school they raise your essay skills, and raise the importance of the essay. They say it will prepare you for the future but what they mean by that it prepares you for college. It does not help you if you decide to work or do anything else besides college. In college they say it will prepare you for the real world. But no it doesn’t. while some jobs do require a lot of writing, such as grant writers, journalists, and so on, the average person after college will never have to write another essay. (For those that may disagree, yes there is an exception. University professors have a fancier essay. They’re called articles, but not many people become professors.)
So the essay is to prepare you to be a lifelong academic and nothing else. It is also a tool teachers use to see what you know. This is why multimodality is so amazing. Teachers can find out what the students know in a way that works with the students mind and gives the students less stress. Let’s be honest… Essays=Stress. and too much stress is a bad thing.
2 Replies to “Multimodal and the real world.”
I have to agree that essays can be very stressful. I always find myself trying to scrape together ideas in order to meet the length requirement or to sound knowledgeable in a subject through forced restrictions. If the teachers allowed the students to express their ideas in multimodal ways (even through writing) then students would be able to express their ideas in more precise manner. In my classes, I have realized that when learning about a subject I understand what the teacher is teaching us, but when it comes to expressing these ideas in a restricted format I loose my own ideas within their guidelines and I find myself trying to please the teacher. I do have to wonder why most teachers stick to these parameters instead of trying new methods in order to improve the student’s learning and their teaching methods?
I think that at this point the essay has become a crutch for a lot of teachers. I once had a physical science teacher who teaches here at chico state and butte. He said on the first day of class that there was a written word requirement for the students, and instead of making us write a 10 page essay at the end of the semester we had weekly worksheets that connected to the chapters. The only requirement was that we wrote out our answers in complete sentences that way we would still have our word requirements met and there was no essay. Then I have had English Professors that gave us nothing but essays all the way to professors that was nope…no essay for you.