Marginally Satisfactory Example 2
Q: Many parents today are choosing to teach their children at home instead of sending them to school. What do you think are some of the reasons for this home schooling movement?
Choosing to teach children at home carries the bad as well as the good side. First, those children taught at home can get a better education. Second, they are not under peer pressure which might have negative effects. Third, some parents could also be afraid to let their children go out into their real world being afraid of losing them. Thus one can see that teaching at home could be a new way to reassure childrens' future especially now when everything is so uncertain.
First, children that are educated at home probably get a better education as compared to children in public schools. Kids at home have a greater advantage since more attention is paid to them by the parent or guardian, and their weaknesses can be detected by their teachers in early stages of the taught course. Those kids can also manage their time a lot better than school system since they can finish a given course faster if they understand it better and concentrate more on subject that give them difficulty. Also, those kids would also do better on average in their courses than kids in schools since they are not as socially active thus having more time to concentrate on their studies. The influence of parents or guardians at home is probably better at home, since it is in the interest of parents to see their kids succeed. At schools the kids can be influenced by their friends which is not always a reliable source. Thus, education is one of the positive factors of teaching children at home.
Peer pressure could be a good reason to teach children at home. As it is evident on the news and from everyday experience that there is more and more violence at schools and the drop-out rate is also increasing. Keeping children at home and teaching them might prevent them from meeting up with the bad crowd and falling into the bad cycle of violence. As it is known from facts, peer pressure also decreases the contact between parents and children, and then children tend to choose or listen to their friends rather than their parents. Children look at their colleagues for tips on future planning which are not always the greatest. Therefore, it is evident that teaching children at home and keeping them away from the peer pressure is another way that makes that type of teaching worth while.
Last, some parents are afraid of losing their kids, so they teach them at home. As written in the previous paragraph it might be good to teach the children at home in order to prevent their corruption. On the other hand it is a selfish reason because those kids do not know anything about the reality of the outside world. In the future they could be treated as different and they probably would not know how to act under certain pressures. Teaching children at home could turn out to be catastrophical to the kids' future since they do not know how to work with people. Thus, it is evidents that "home schooling" has two sides to its story.
Finally, reasons for "home schooling" are not always right. There is good as well as bad side to this movement. Good side involves better education and probably better influence by the parent or guardian which can shape kids' future in a good way. On the other hand kids taught at home are not socially oriented as well as kids taught at schools, which could create a great deal of consequences in their future. Therefore, it is not certain if the "home schooling" is a positive or a negative movement since different people have different reasons for either "home schooling" or sending their kids to school.
Sample 3 DISCUSSION:
This essay, written by a writer for whom English is a second language (ESL), explores reasons for the movement toward home schooling. The content and development are clearly satisfactory; in fact, the analysis shows some nice insight into parents' motivations to teach their children at home. While there are some sentence, grammar, and word problems, there are no serious problems with verb form, tense, or agreement. Nonetheless, the problems in expression led both markers to call the paper borderline--although they both passed it. As one marker put it, "Most errors . . . boil down to a lack of general facility with English idiomatic sentence structure and are not easily correctable."