Thistles vs. Thesis

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A Familiar Essay: A Ride Through the Thesis Patch

I have come to an amusing analogy between an experience I had as a young boy and my

current profession as a composition teacher.

In the summer of 1984 my father bought a 160-acre farm ten miles from town, and to my

eternal misery, he moved us, which included my father, mother, and me, there. The land on the

edges of our new farm was fenced off into alfalfa and wheat fields. The rest was a withering

pasture comprised of thirsty grass, vast forests of thistles, and countless craters of striped gopher

mounds.

One day in late June, I was helping my dad grease our John Deer "A" before we took it to

mow alfalfa, when a strange green truck pulled into our yard. A peculiar little man got out and

approached us. He had a long, white beard that would have reached to his waist had it not been

so windy. Instead it flowed horizontally from his chin. My dad went to see what he wanted while

I quickly finished greasing the tractor.

When I was done, I peered up and noticed my dad leaning against the side of the man's

truck with one hand tucked in the lone back pocket of his tattered Levi's. "Yes," I thought. This

was promising. Dad was in his "visiting" stance. The man too was propped up against the side

of the truck. This had the makings of a real jaw session. As I plotted my escape, I noticed that

the driver's side door had a square yellow plaque on it with "State of MN" stenciled on it in

square black lettering.

So I crept over to a shed on the other side of the truck, feigning that I was looking for a

tube of grease. Had Dad not been so wrapped up in whatever they were talking about, he would



have recognized this ploy right away and cast me out to the field to mow. I was in luck. Dad

was wholly engrossed in the conversation. It was going to be a real jaw session indeed, for I was

able to effortlessly slip around the shed and dash toward the house. Within five minutes I was in

a T-shirt and cut off jogging pants, lying on my bed with Def Leppard on the stereo and Stephen

King's The Tommyknockers in my hands.

Eventually, Dad beckoned me back to work, and we mowed the 60-acre alfalfa field later

that day. Over the clatter of the blades, Dad explained to me that the visitor was the state "weed

inspector."

"There's no pot around here!" I shouted over the chugging tractor and the racing blades

slicing down the alfalfa.

"No. He inspects wild weeds like . . . " and my dad began rattling off names of plants that

I had never heard of before, like "leafy" something and something "spurge" or maybe it was

"leafy spurge." Then my dad explained to me that the "weed" inspector also warned him about

the thistles. Amidst the withering grass, the thistles battled the gophers for supremacy of our

pasture.

I had encountered them several times on my three wheeler. In fact, my favorite thing to

do when my friends from town visited was to rev up my three wheeler and take them through a

thistle patch. I, of course, would lift my legs up onto the front fender and race through the thick

patches. My friends would be caught unaware and scream as the thistles tore and gouged their

legs. They would beat on my back and vainly try to raise their legs out of the way. However, that

was impossible for they would have to lift their legs up and forward, which would bring them

only deeper into the thistles as they whizzed by scraping the gas tank, my friend's legs, and the



rear plastic fenders before going under the tires. I would roar the whole time until my sides

ached.

My dad said the state inspector warned that if we didn't spray the thistles, they would

literally storm the entire farm. Of course, my dad was not about to buy into any such type of

conspiracy theory. After all, he adamantly believed Lee Harvey Oswald really shot Kennedy and

that Area 51 was actually just a military base. Plus, there was no way my dad was going to pay

the state to fly a plane over and douse the thistles with weed killer.

So he informed me that once we were done mowing the alfalfa, we were going to cut

down the thistles. This, of course, was only a temporary solution since the roots would still be

intact and the thistles would simply grow back again later in the summer, germinate, and then lie

dormant over the winter. But Dad didn't seem too concerned up about that.

After mowing the alfalfa, we made one good sweep through the thistles when something

wonderful happened. The far end of the mower dug into a gopher's mound and snapped the drive

shaft that ran the mower. Wonderful. It was around six in the evening and both of our stomachs

were growling, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend the entire evening mowing thistles.

Unfortunately as we pulled into the yard, Dad said "I want you to come with me out to the

quonset."

Uh-oh. The quonset was my dad's laboratory, so to speak. From there he hatched all of

his crazy ideas to keep me busy while he was gone.

I trailed him to the quonset in the dark part of the evening when our yard light turned on

and illuminated everything in fake yellow light. He entered the quonset, rummaged around, and



emerged with what looked like a wooden stick with some blue, twisted and jagged metal on the

bottom.

"What is that?" I asked.

"It's an old fashioned sickle.”

Oh no. I could tell right away what he had planned: Kurt vs. the thistles.

"Dad, I won't be able to get them all. Dad, they'll just regrow. Dad, why don't we wait

until the mower is fixed. Dad, then I'll gladly mow them down next week. Dad . . ."

But Dad wasn't having any of it. And so began my battle with the thistles. I spent many

scorching July and August afternoons with my walkman stuffed into the back pocket of my jeans

teeing off, literally, with the weed whacker, for it was little more than a wooden shafted golf club.

Instead of a club at the end, though, this thing had a flimsy row of metal teeth. Part golf club;

part saw.

The thistles had no natural enemies in our pasture. Our herd of 500 sheep sure didn't eat

them. If Rambo was a plant, he would be a thistle. They had organized themselves into great,

dense battalions around the pasture. Sometimes they were so tightly clustered that it was hard for

me to cut a path through them. Despite their best efforts to defend themselves, it became my

personal mission to drive the invaders from our land.

Over 10 years later, the thistles did indeed take over much of our farm, despite my valiant

efforts. My dad finally relented and paid a local crop duster to drop the herbicide bomb on them.

I failed miserably in my stand against the thistles. In fact, by chopping them down

when they were ripe and blooming, I unwittingly helped spread them. Their spores would catch



the rare breezes and float across our land. But I didn't know any better then. I was just doing my

job.

Now, what does that experience have to do with teaching English, specifically teaching

composition? Well, a lot actually.

Well, in composition there is an entity much like the thistle. It can invade an area and

populate and choke out all of the good land. Likewise, it will serve as a nuisance, both literally

and figuratively, for both the landholder and any one unlucky enough to come across it without

adequate protection.

This entity is the five-paragraph theme.

Okay, to stretch this metaphor to greater lengths, I stepped into my first Communications

class with a curriculum that included writing a four-page research paper. "No big deal," I

unwittingly thought. I'm sure that is exactly what my dad thought when he saw the first thistles

sprouting up too.

Before I knew it, we were three weeks into the research paper. It was only later in my

teaching career that I realized I was unwittingly spreading the spores across my classroom. I

infested my students with such statements as, "your thesis must have three aspects and it must

come at the end of your introduction" and "each of your corresponding supporting paragraphs

must have a topic sentence that correlates to an individual aspect stated in your thesis" and "you

must use at least one direct quote and one paraphrase in each of your supporting paragraphs too"

and "your conclusion should restate your thesis" and "your final page will be your works cited,"

and "you must include an outline that corresponds to your research paper's form." I thought,



egads, that I was teaching my poor students how to write, just as I thought I was doing some

good hacking away at the thistles 10 years earlier.

It is only now that I can see what the thesis/support paper really is: a rampant, parasitic

creature that, instead of choking off quality pasture land and invading crops, chokes off a writer's

voice and invades genuine writing.

The final straw for my dad with the thistles occurred when he was going to break open an

alfalfa bail and feed it to some sheep. The bail erupted and instead of sprinkling alfalfa leaves

into the trough, it spewed thistles in Dad’s face. The bail, in the guise of alfalfa, secretly housed

a thistle. Somehow the thistles had breached his beloved alfalfa fields.

The final straw for me with the thesis/support theme occurred when I sat down to grade

my Communications class's final personal essays. We had gotten the research paper out of the

way earlier in the year, so I was really looking forward to these personal essays. I expected to

encounter some interesting perspectives and genuine experience and, maybe even some shocking

incidents. Instead the essays blew up in my face, exposing the five paragraph themes that lurked

at their core. Instead of feeling free to write in some of the other forms we covered, my students

had become overrun by the thesis/support form. Imagine instead of reading a lively narrative

essay on a student's first deer hunt as a rite of passage, getting a bland introduction concluding

with "I learned three important lessons from my first deer hunt: how to work with others, how to

trust myself, and how to take pride in a job well done" as its thesis. There is nothing more

distressing for a composition teacher (at least a good one) to expect some lively exploratory

essays and only to find out that they are themes in disguise. Somehow the thesis had breached

my beloved teaching of the exploratory and personal writing.



So now it has become my personal mission to, if not eradicate, at least return the balance

to my classroom between the 'theme' papers and the familiar essays. The task is a daunting one.

While thistles can creep up and infest acre upon acre if unchecked, so can thesis/support papers.

In The Essay, Paul Heilker, notes a study done by Russel K. Durst in which Durst discovered

that once students learned the thesis/support paper form "'they tended to rely on the

thesis/support structure almost exclusively in their English critical writing'" and "Ninety percent

of the student texts in his sample were organized this way, students using the thesis/support form

to structure literary analysis, autobiographical, informative, and argumentative compositions, and

even writing outside of the English class." Furthermore, "the students in this study 'were almost

totally faithful to the thesis/support [form] in their high school English writing, using it in

virtually all of their [papers] from ninth grade on'" (2-3). If that doesn't reveal the frightening

reality of a full blown infestation problem, I don’t know what else can.

So now it is my responsibility to try to cure my students of this blight. I plan to douse

them with the familiar/exploratory/personal essay. Willaim Zeiger notes in his report “The

Exploratory Essay: Enfranchising the Spiri of Inquiry in College Composition” that composition

teachers need to begin exposing their students to familiar essays that foster ruminitive thinking

and writing. This introduces students to the inquiry process of writing, which is often neglected

at the univerisyt and high school levels. Instead teachers tend to solely expose their students to

the demonstrative or expository process of writing, which involves producing thesis/support

papers.

I will hack away at the backward thesis inspired demonstrative form of the research paper

and plant the open and exploratory form of the familiar essay in its place, or at least next to it.



Will I be able to totally expunge my classroom of the thesis/support form? No. Instead I

will teach them to use the familiar essay to foster the process of inquiry first. Then I will teach

them how to apply what they have discovered to the demonstrative or expository process that has

come to choke out the exploratory process in English classrooms at both high schools and

universities.

I will also keep the thesis/support paper around because it is a viable writing form, not

the only writing form as most seem to think. Even if I had been able to destroy all of the thistles,

I still would have kept a few around for variety. They are a viable life form after all.

And maybe, just maybe if we hit a lull in my classroom, I can rev up my three wheeler

and take my students screaming on a ride through the thesis/support patch. Maybe that will teach

them a lesson.



Works Cited

Heilker, Paul. The Essay. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.

Thistles vs. Thesis

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