You Think YOUR Teachers Are Mean

In many parts of the world today, as was the case in America until just several short decades ago, students are routinely subjected to abusive treatment by their teachers. The severe humiliation suffered recently by a student in China drove her to suicide, forcing the Chinese government to consider laws forbidding abusive punishment in the classroom.

My wife, Komang, was raised in Indonesia, and has recounted to me several similarly sad stories from her own first hand experience, including being forced to stand outside and look at the sun, because she gave an incorrect answer in class.

Certainly, no teacher has the right to abuse or humiliate students in his or her charge. Fear and pain are NOT the best ways to motivate students to learn, to say the least.

Neither do students have the right to disobey or threaten their teachers, who must be able to enforce authority and discipline in their classrooms through common sense means such as reseating, docking grades, or expulsion from class.

Abuse, humiliation, cruelty, and violence are features of a sick, dysfunctional culture. Thankfully, we may finally be seeing significant changes occurring throughout much of the world that make such abusive behavior unacceptable and punishable by law.

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Copyright © 2006-present: Christopher R. Borland. All rights reserved.

Top 10 SAT Essay Tips

Examine the sample essays in any SAT test prep book, including the College Board’s own publications, and you’ll find, despite all the hot air to the contrary, that the single factor most obviously correlated to high SAT essay scores is ... length.

It’s a fact: all else being equal, long essays get much higher scores than short essays. Fill up those pages!

Of course, it helps to be an award-winning writer who can pen a remarkably solid, insightful, and moving essay in his sleep ... but honestly, how many high school students (or award-winning writers, for that matter) can be counted on to produce such a work in the short 25 minute period allowed for the essay on the SAT1?

Remember, above all ... it’s about LENGTH!

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Top 10 SAT essay tips:

1. You simply MUST write a long essay, if you expect to earn a high score. How long is long? More than one and a half pages of the two pages provided to you on which to write and submit your essay (ideally, you’d finish within a few lines of the very end of the last page).

2. In addition, your essay needs to be properly structured. That is, it must have 4-5 distinct paragraphs: an introduction, 2-3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion. A representative of the Princeton Review told me that SAT essays are initially scanned by computer to see how many lines are written on (again, it’s about length) and how may paragraphs there are (i.e. how many indented lines there are); essays that are too short or unstructured (i.e. not enough paragraphs) are assigned low scores (1-3) by a computer, and not even read by a real human being!

3. Therefore, you should "super indent" each paragraph. If your paragraphs are not well indented, the computer scanning your essay may not realize when you’re beginning a new paragraph, and assign a low score to your essay because it appeared to lack the required 4-5 paragraph structure. You do NOT want that to happen. So, make SURE the machine will recognize each of your paragraphs by using super-sized indents. I recommend using a huge two-inch indent (at least one full thumb-length) on the first line of each paragraph, just to be absolutely sure (this also adds a little bit to the overall length of your essay).

4. Spend the first two to three minutes writing a very short outline for your essay, in which you answer the following two questions: 1. WHAT do I believe (your thesis), and 2. WHY do I believe it (convincing examples that prove your point, ordered so that the best example comes last and the second best coming first).

5. Then, write furiously for about 20 minutes, sticking to your outline, and be SURE to finish writing your conclusion before time is up (so you'll have at least some time left over to quickly proofread your essay). Time is very short – you really do have to hurry – and any essay submitted without a conclusion will not (of course) be given a high score.

6. Finally, take two to three minutes to proofread your essay, making simple corrections and edits, improving overall neatness and appearance, etc.

7. Write legibly, keeping your left margins neatly aligned. SAT essay readers have hundreds of essays to read in a single day. This means that your essay will not be carefully read, and the overall "impression" it leaves after a single reading is extremely important. You do NOT want to make someone who's reading her 258th essay that day have to deal with sloppy margins or work really hard just to decipher your handwriting!

8. In each body paragraph, make your point clearly and succinctly in the topic sentence that introduces it. Each topic sentences should essentially be a customized restatement of the essay's thesis (which should be clearly and unambiguously stated in the introductory paragraph) written in terms of the particular supporting example forming the basis of that body paragraph. Then, in the rest of the paragraph, your job is to elaborate on the topic sentence, showing clearly and simply how this particular example supports the thesis of your essay.

9. The conclusion, which should be the shortest paragraph in your SAT essay, restates the thesis in completely different words, offers a final comment or two, and ends with a thoughtful or uplifting “kicker” line.

10. Perfectionist? Not today. You simply don't have time to write a really excellent, polished essay. Do NOT expect to produce your best work here! Don't get bogged down. Just complete the essay in the allotted time (you MUST get to the conclusion before time is up; essays submitted without a conclusion will get a low score), do a decent job, and read over the entire essay to catch and correct any obvious mistakes. Remember ... on SAT essays, quantity is FAR more important than quality (although, naturally, it’s best to have both). This fact stands in stark contrast to the essays assigned by your teachers – which WILL be carefully read, for which you’re given days or weeks to do the necessary thinking, writing, and polishing, and in which quality is always more important than quantity.

A final word of advice:

PRACTICE IS KEY!!

Unless you are well accustomed to this kind of lightning-fast writing, you will almost certainly not finish on time the first time you write an SAT essay. You certainly don’t want your first attempt to be the one that gets scored! It is absolutely essential that you practice writing SAT essays, incorporating all 10 tips listed above, until you are quite comfortable doing so in under 25 minutes. Get essay prompts for practice essays from the internet (google “SAT essay prompts”), or take them from published SAT workbooks.

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Note:

In a March 4, 2005 article in the New York Times, M.I.T. testing specialist and director of undergraduate writing Dr. Les Perelman discussed the striking positive correlation between length and scores on SAT essays, and came to the same conclusion – that, basically, it's all about length and structure, not content or quality. In fact, Dr. Perelman was able, with 90% accuracy, to immediately guess the score given to an SAT essay with just a quick glance at its length and shape (i.e. structure). The article also mentions that SAT essay graders are instructed not to lower an essay score due to the inclusion of factual errors. Apparently, citing blatantly incorrect facts such as "the beginning of the World War I in 1903," or "The Road Less Traveled by poet T.S. Elliot" does nothing to diminish one's score on an SAT essay (the First World War began in 1914, and Robert Frost wrote "The Road Not Taken").

From the article:

"I would advise writing as long as possible," said Dr. Perelman, "and include lots of facts, even if they're made up." This, of course, is not what he teaches his M.I.T. students. "It's exactly what we don't want to teach our kids," he said.

Read the entire article here.

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Copyright © 2006-present: Christopher R. Borland. All rights reserved.

State Of Body And Mind

I’m always amazed to find that students actually stay out late and party the night before taking a big test, like the SAT.

What are they thinking?

Nothing hurts test performance more than sleep deprivation. I’ve seen students lose hundreds of points on the SAT because they stayed up the night before, got three hours of sleep, and then showed up tired and bleary-eyed to take the most important test of their lives!

I don’t know how else to put this ... Please don’t be stupid!

The word “stupid” actually comes from the word “stupor” which refers to a coma-like state of near-senseless unconsciousness – similar to how you're likely to feel while taking the SAT after being out all night the previous evening. So, the word “stupid” is not, in fact, an insult, but simply means “asleep” or “unconscious.” Common sense says it's a very bad idea to be in an exhausted stupor-like state while taking your SAT ... unless for some reason you really do intend to ruin your score.

Get plenty of sleep at least two nights before test day. Get up early the day of the test, and get to the test center 30 minutes ahead of schedule (just in case something goes wrong). Use these 30 minutes not to socialize, but rather to “warm up” by reviewing key SAT strategies and previously taken practice tests and notes, so you can “hit the ground running” and maximize your score.

You should do all you can to put yourself in a peak state of body and mind for any important competition, whether athletic or academic.

Great athletes prepare for their events by taking good care of themselves before a contest, and by arriving early to warm up physically and psyche themselves up mentally, so that at the moment they have to perform they’re able to fully concentrate and deliver 100% of their potential to the task at hand.

As a test taker, an "academic athlete," be careful to follow this example, so that you too will be able to perform at your very best!

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Copyright © 2006-present: Christopher R. Borland. All rights reserved.

To Spell Or Not To Spell

British academic Ken Smith, exhausted from the war against atrocious spelling, is suggesting the time has come for profs to embrace common misspellings of words as acceptable variants.

Should teachers look the other way when students write "ignor" for "ignore," "arguement" for "argument," or "Febuary" for "February?" Is the cause of correct spelling still a battle worth fighting in the age of chat-speak and spell check?

From Smith's article in The Times Higher Education:

... Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I've got a better idea. University teachers should simply accept as variant spelling those words our students most commonly misspell.

The spelling of the word "judgement", for example, is now widely accepted as a variant of "judgment", so why can't "truely" be accepted as a variant spelling of "truly"? 

Smith goes on to submit ten words as examples of common misspellings that should be declared legitimate English variants, among them:

- Arguement for argument. Why do we drop the "e" in argument (and in judgment) but not in management? We do not pronounce "argument" "ar-gum-ent", so why should we spell it this way?

- Febuary for February (and Wensday for Wednesday). We spell the word "February" the way we do only because it is taken from the Latin word februa, the Roman festival of purification. Similarly, the "correct" spelling of the word "Wednesday" comes from the Old English Wodnes daeg, or Woden's day. But why should we still pay homage today to a pagan god or a Roman festival of purification?

- Ignor for ignore. The word "ignore" comes from the Latin ignorare meaning "to know" and ignarus meaning "ignorant". Neither of these words has an "e" after the "r", so why do we?

 
Although at first I bristled reflexively at the notion of lowering the guard of academic rigor protecting traditional English orthography, I then took the point made in a recent Reuters article on Smith's controversial recommendation that no language, it seems, is less consistent than English in obeying it's own spelling rules or more arbitrary in allowing variants:

Playwright George Bernard Shaw was fond of pointing out that the word "ghoti" could just as well be pronounced "fish" if you followed common pronunciation: 'gh' as in "tough", 'o' as in "women" and 'ti' as in "nation".

Hmmm.

To spell, or not to spell ... which is nobler?

That is indeed the kweschun.

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Copyright © 2006-present: Christopher R. Borland. All rights reserved.

Can a Beautiful Hand Improve Grades?

Doctors aren't the only ones with indecipherable handwriting.

Many of us, myself included, have fallen prey to the temptation to neglect the art of penmanship in favor of barely legible scratch that most other people cannot easily read. This is easier and easier to do, of course, given how much of our writing we now do on keyboards of various types.

Using a keyboard, without the need to consciously form individual letters, we can write much, much faster, it's true. But is there a cost to ignoring the art of proper handwriting?

The administrators, teachers, and students of the Mary Erskine and Stewart's Melville Junior School in Edinburgh, Scotland would say yes, absolutely, there is a severe cost to be paid for ignoring the ancient art of penmanship.

The real cost is not in developing the embarrassing scrawl that passes so often these days as handwriting, but rather in missing out on the boosted levels of effort and intention forced by the use of the traditional fountain pen itself. Apparently, the mechanics of the implement require one to enter a higher state of focus and concentration which then transfers over to the information one is writing about, producing a habit of greater commitment and energy that directly translates into better learning of course content, as well.

At these two Scottish schools, all students and teachers are required to take special handwriting instruction, and do most of their work utilizing modern fountain pens.

It all really seems to work rather well.

Once you've gotten the feel of the classic writing implement, a task made much easier by modern improvements in fountain pens, it's something you'd never want to give up, they say.

The article is a very interesting read:

School shuns tech, teaches fountain pen

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Copyright © 2006-present: Christopher R. Borland. All rights reserved.