I was sitting in a cramped exam hall last Tuesday, watching a student stare blankly at a prompt about a difficult childhood memory. He finally started writing, but after three lines, I saw it: “He felt very sad. Then he felt very angry.” I almost sighed out loud. He was clearly a bright man, but
I was sitting in a humid, cramped exam hall in Johannesburg last Tuesday, watching a student stare blankly at a prompt about a bustling market. He had the vocabulary—he was using words like “magnificent” and “spectacular”—but he was using them like a blunt instrument, hitting the page without actually painting a picture. It is the
I remember sitting in a cramped exam hall ten years ago, watching a student stare at a prompt about a family member, his pen hovering uselessly over the paper. He wasn’t struggling with English; he was struggling with the expectation that he needed to be a novelist. Most textbooks tell you that learning how to
I was sitting in a cramped exam center last Tuesday, watching a student stare at a bar chart as if it were written in ancient hieroglyphics. He knew the data, but his writing was a repetitive, painful loop of “a lot of people” and “some people.” It’s the same thing I see every single year:
I remember sitting in a dimly lit exam hall ten years ago, watching a student stare at a line graph with absolute, paralyzed dread. She had the data right in front of her, yet she was struggling with how to describe trends and changes because she was trying to hunt for “sophisticated” academic jargon she’d
I was sitting in my office last Tuesday, staring at a pile of practice essays, when I saw it again: “The man said… then the man walked… because the man was tired.” It’s the same pattern I’ve been marking for nineteen years. Most textbooks will tell you that you need a massive, encyclopedic vocabulary to
I was sitting in a cramped exam hall last Tuesday, looking down at a student’s essay, when I saw it again: the “Thesaurus Explosion.” He had replaced every single common verb with a complex, heavy-handed alternative that made his sentences feel like they were choking. Most textbooks will tell you that learning how to use
I can still see the faces of my students from last Tuesday—that specific, hollow look of exhaustion when they realize they’ve spent three weeks memorizing a list of “advanced” synonyms only to fail the writing section. They came to me asking how to learn vocabulary for an exam as if there were some magic glossary
Stop wasting your weekends highlighting entire chapters of a textbook and praying for a miracle. I see it every single year: bright, capable students sitting for their exams, only to freeze because they tried to memorize a dictionary instead of focusing on what actually matters. They think that if they just cram more words into
I can still see the look on my student’s face three years ago—a mix of sheer panic and confusion—when I handed back his essay. He had tried so hard to impress the examiner by sprinkling “colorful” phrases into every sentence, but he had used them so clumsily that his writing felt like a jigsaw puzzle