Friday, March 21, 2014

Can you help me with writing a descriptive essay on the experience of a classroom without a teacher?

Since you are tasked with describing something you must imagine, your first step is to close your eyes and visualize a teacher-less classroom. What does that look like in your mind's eye? Jot short notes or phrases that will help you remember what you're seeing. The more clearly you visualize, the better your essay will be. Imagine you are a student in this classroom. What does it feel like? How do you like it? Note any feelings or sensations associated with your image.
Using your imagined picture, choose a thesis statement. It might be something like, "A classroom without a teacher is total chaos," or "Students learn better without a teacher." Let your image lead you. Then, organize your essay around your thesis. A good hook might be to describe your classroom to the reader; try to make readers see your classroom the same way you do. Throughout the essay, keep picturing your teacher-less classroom. Use that image to support your thesis.
For example, in your imagination are the students engaged and learning? How can you tell? What are they doing? Their actions and expressions are what you want to describe. Why do students learn better without a teacher? Because you "saw" them working individually at computers, and helping each other with questions. You "saw" how much more efficient it was. Or maybe you pictured unruly kids talking, throwing things, and running around the class. Describing this scene to your readers supports a thesis that a classroom without a teacher is total chaos.
It is said a picture is worth 1,000 words. Create a clear picture in your mind, and you'll have no trouble writing a few-hundred word essay. Have fun with it! And remember there is no right or wrong description of what this new type of classroom would be like. Your experience is unique to you.


A descriptive essay is an essay topic that English or writing teachers like to frequently give at some point in the year. At first look, the process can be daunting, but the writing prompt given is fairly specific, so that will help a great deal. I'm not allowed to write the essay for you; however, it does seem like a potentially really fun topic. The descriptive essay itself is an essay that asks a writer to describe something. It could be an object, place, person, experience, emotion, or situation. There is a lot of flexibility within the form of this essay, but the main goal is that the piece paints a vivid image in the mind of the reader. With that in mind, I'd like to offer some tips to get you going in the right direction.
One of the first things to decide is what the topic is going to be. This has been decided for you, but that's only a small part of the rhetorical situation. Another thing that has to be decided is who is narrating. Will you, as a student within this classroom, be the person that is narrating the story? This is where the story's flexibility comes in because your narrator doesn't have to be you or even another student within the classroom without a teacher. Your narrator could be a literal fly on the wall. You could even get creepy and have your narrator watching the events from a control room using hidden cameras and microphones throughout the room. You also have to decide on what genre you are going to write. Will your essay be a comedy, a horror story, a news piece, or something else? Finally, another thing to think about is where your essay will take place. What grade level doesn't have a teacher? A first grade classroom without a teacher is going to be a very different place than a college classroom.
The next thing to do is create an attention grabbing hook. You need to get your reader's attention right away. The first sentence is key. You could start by asking your reader a question in order to get them thinking about the situation. You could start with a quote. This could be interesting to play around with because the quote could be completely made up. It could be a piece of dialogue that a fictional student shouts out at the top of his/her lungs about the teacher being gone. The hook could be a bold, declarative sentence that sets the reader on edge. This worked amazingly well for Andy Weir's book The Martian.
Now that the first sentence is done, you can begin writing about the experience that a classroom without a teacher is to your narrator. An important thing to remember throughout the descriptive essay is to describe what the situation is like. Use vivid language to really help the reader understand what is it like in the classroom. Use similes and metaphors more than you normally would for a school essay. If you are drawing a blank on how to describe something or what to actually describe, consider your five senses. Tell your reader what it is that you see, smell, hear, feel, and even taste. For example, "It was five minutes into the class period, and the teacher was still absent. The students were all starting to get the same feeling. They could practically taste the freedom that was slowly wafting into the classroom like the smell of freshly fried bacon."
A final recommendation is to stay organized. You might be tempted to write this essay in a stream of consciousness style. That could definitely work, but I don't recommend it. I understand that writing it in stream of consciousness makes sense, but it makes sense to you. Your reader is not you, and his/her stream flows slightly differently. The stream of consciousness will likely be a very jarring read for your reader, so stick with an organized format. Perhaps write each paragraph about what each of your senses are experiencing. This organization isn't perhaps realistic, but it does allow you to guide your reader into reading and experiencing each item in full detail in the order that you want the reader to experience it in.
https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html

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