Wednesday 2 March 2016

PEE, Which, I Believe, is Alliteration.

PEE: A three week old bucket of piss.

Ever suffered the wrath of a teacher foaming at the mouth, muttering party slogans under their breath as they berate you for your lack of PEE? You may just be a victim of the East Cricklewood Marxist Re-education camp.

Point, Evidence, Explanation. As simple as it seems, simple is not necessarily equivalent to good (see Simplesimonskowski and his half-baked policies). Glaringly apparent is the vile nature of this widely propagated doctrine; parents spend good time beating their children into the realisation that pointing is rude. Who or what are these SLT to undo all their hard work?

PEE is a rigid, poorly thought out structure that is frequently ill-used as a be-all-and-end-all. While effective at introducing students to the fundamental concepts of essay writing, this effectiveness is limited, particularly when exams frequently demand an ability to think analytically about unfamiliar situations in limited time. Allowing students to develop their own stylistic devices as opposed to restricting them to an overly simplistic, myopic tool would mean that come exam time, students would merely have to grapple with the thinking behind their answers, having become comfortable with essay writing through their time at EMRC, rather than having warped their own writing style and subsequently their own thought process in pursuit of a common human excretion.

The hindrance of PEE has repercussions further into its adherents future than their GCSE's however. The leap between 5 GCSE's and any further education is dramatic, and what barely suffices at GCSE is miserably piss-poor at A-level: a fumbling four lines on how cusses are the holocaust would be violently discarded by even the most benevolent of examiners. Despite apparently easing the burden of marking, a pervasive clunkiness emerges within the first few lines of a PEE paragraph and after 12 sides of the same point (very slightly rephrased once a page) the mind of any reader is now as dulled as a sample of CaterLink cutlery.

1 comment:

  1. There has been a recognition on the part of the powers that be in education that PEE is a stilted formula for at least the last two years. Good teachers have known this for much, much longer. If anyone is still teaching it, then they are clearly out of touch. https://reflectingenglish.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/beyond-pee-reuniting-reading-and-writing/

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