Students write an essay describing a banana tree without ever seeing one!

I would like to add another story to illustrate the teaching of model essays. This year, due to the long holidays of April 30 and May 1, my friend in Ho Chi Minh City brought his whole family to visit my house in Cu Chi. My house has a small garden with several types of fruit trees, a pond next to the house that blooms with lotus, water lilies, and water hyacinth all year round; and in the pond there are perch and striped catfish swimming around looking for food.

5th grade student sees banana tree for the first time

My friend's nephew is a boy, so he is very active, running around the garden, asking every tree or animal he sees: "What kind of tree is this, grandpa? Is the fruit edible?". I picked a bunch of rambutans for him. He tried a few fruits, praised them for being delicious, and said: "I'll save these to show off to my friends in class tomorrow and let them try them." Then he kept urging his grandfather to take out his phone to take a few pictures of him holding a bunch of rambutans, or touching a grapefruit so that his mother could quickly post them online to show everyone...

Suddenly he turned to me and asked: "Grandpa, do you have banana trees planted at home? Take me out to see them later!". I was surprised and thought he didn't see the banana bushes next to the rambutan trees I had just picked for him to eat, but the boy honestly said he had never seen or known about banana trees before. I said: "Your house has a lot of banana trees planted. Take me out to see the banana trees that are blooming." As promised, when the boy finished eating the rambutans, I took him to the banana bushes, pointed at them and said: "This is a banana bush because there are a lot of banana trees growing here. Just look and observe."

I observed for about 15 minutes and then ran in and said: "Now I know that the banana tree has one leaf, its trunk is round and feels smooth and slippery, the banana tree is over two meters tall, the bunch of bananas has so many fruits, right grandpa... Last year when I was in 4th grade, my teacher gave me an assignment to write an essay describing a banana tree. When I did the assignment, I relied on the sample essay that the teacher corrected in class to describe a royal poinciana tree in the school yard and I went online to look at pictures of the banana tree, asked my mother how the farmer planted the banana tree, what the banana leaves look like, how long it takes for the fruit to ripen when it is still young... Then I did the assignment, I changed the name of the royal poinciana tree to the name of the banana tree and added some observations I saw online and heard my mother describe, the teacher commented that my essay understood the genre of writing about trees and knew how to observe trees, the essay was complete and good."

Banana bushes in real life

He also told me that a few months ago, he and his friend argued about whether people grow banana trees from seedlings or seeds. In the end, it was only after the teacher explained that we realized that people grow banana trees from seedlings...

I heard my friend's nephew say that and felt sorry for the students. Nowadays, children just follow the model essays when studying literature. Whenever they encounter a topic describing an object or a genre, they just rely on the model essay to change the name, change the surname, sometimes: "Truong Ba's soul, butcher's body" without ever directly observing or witnessing the object they are describing. At best, students look it up on the internet to find out, like my friend's nephew described a banana tree without knowing anything about banana trees. Now he stands in front of a banana bush without knowing about banana trees. After hearing me explain about the tree, leaves, fruits... he was very happy and exclaimed happily and surprisedly: "Thanks to going to your hometown, I know about banana trees, grandpa."

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