Discussion
There's maybe a better way to say this but it's frankly more fun to talk like an unhinged tech grifter while being 90+% honest, so
I think the Five Paragraph Essay as a cornerstone of middle-school pedagogy is outdated, in our modern times. I think it needs to be overhauled to meet the wants and needs of today's youth in the YouTube Age.
@gaditb I might take that argument more seriously if it were followed by three supporting arguments and a conclusion.
@aschmitz I recpgnize the irony that this is a persuasive/argumentative piece that I am putting out.
We can have then cover "pursuasive essay" in high school, in a larger section about rhetoric. Put it years downstream of "do some research and tell me about it".
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Middle schoolers don't and probably never did need to be snatching for readers' attention or arguing against an imagined opposition.
Just let them start "if you clicked this 30 minute video(/opened this 3-page blogpost) about interesting villagers in Minecraft I'm assuming you want to learn about interesting villagers in Minecraft. But to make sure we're all on the same page getting into it, here's what Minecraft is and how villagers function within it."
Teach them how to collect information into sections and present it, and to try to generalize out a larger common-themes for that organization-scheme to use and be stronger.