I can still see the look on my student’s face last Tuesday—that specific, crushing moment of realization when they saw their essay score. They had the vocabulary of a scholar and the logic of a philosopher, yet they were bleeding points because they couldn’t decide between “suggest doing” and “suggest to do.” Most textbooks will
I was sitting in a dimly lit exam hall last Tuesday, watching a student stare at a blank page, when I saw it again: the classic, heavy-handed attempt to sound “academic” that actually just made their writing unreadable. They had been told that knowing how to use participle clauses is the golden ticket to a
I was sitting in a quiet exam hall last Tuesday, the only sound the rhythmic scratching of pens, when I saw it again. A student—brilliant, clearly well-read—had just written a sentence that was technically grammatical but logically messy, losing marks simply because they didn’t know how to use commas with relative clauses correctly. It’s that
I was sitting in a cramped exam hall last Tuesday, watching a student stare at a blank page, when it hit me again. She wasn’t struggling with vocabulary or complex ideas; she was drowning because she couldn’t connect them. Most textbooks treat grammar like a math equation, giving you endless, dry diagrams to explain how
I was sitting in a cramped, dimly lit exam hall last Tuesday, watching a student stare at a blank page, her pen hovering just inches from the paper. I could almost hear the internal gears grinding as she struggled with a simple sentence, paralyzed by the fear of choosing between much and many. It’s a
I was sitting in a quiet corner of a lecture hall last Tuesday, watching a brilliant student—a professional with years of experience—stutter through a simple sentence about “advices” and “informations.” It wasn’t a lack of intelligence that tripped them up; it was a lack of habit. Most textbooks try to bury you in endless, abstract
I was sitting in a quiet corner of a testing center last Tuesday, marking a stack of advanced level essays, when I saw it again. For the hundredth time, a brilliant student—someone who clearly understood complex sentence structures—lost three precious marks simply because they couldn’t grasp how to use zero article correctly. They wrote “the
I was sitting in a cramped exam hall last Tuesday, the air thick with the scent of stale coffee and nervous sweat, watching a student stare blankly at a writing prompt. She knew the vocabulary, she had the complex sentence structures, and her ideas were brilliant—but she was hemorrhaging marks because she simply didn’t know
I was sitting in a cramped classroom in Johannesburg last Tuesday, watching a student with a brilliant mind stare in total frustration at a practice paper. He had the vocabulary of a scholar, but he was hemorrhaging marks because he couldn’t grasp the simple logic of how articles work. It’s the same story I’ve seen
I was sitting in a cramped exam hall last Tuesday, the air thick with the smell of stale coffee and nervous sweat, watching a student stare blankly at a writing prompt. She was bright—highly intelligent, actually—but she was paralyzed by the same old confusion that plagues so many of my adult learners: how to use