Louisville Courier-Journal

The Art of Writing
The SAT steps up college test with an essay question – and it won't be easy

Mark Coomes
Courier-Journal

Professor Bernie, as he likes to be known, preaches the gospel of good prose with evangelistic zeal.

But he is not a fiery person and certainly not a mean one. Which is why, though he is talking on a telephone 500 miles north in Toronto, you can feel him wince when he tells a story that perfectly, if brutally, illustrates his central dogma:

Today's kids can't write, and they are suffering in school and in the workplace because of it.

Todd was a 10th-grader who always had struggled to put his thoughts on paper. He made up his mind to get a better grade on his next assignment, a routine high school essay.

He was sure he had succeeded.

He was wrong.

His teacher returned the paper in a chilly manner and declared, "You'll never amount to anything if you can't write a simple essay."

Who wouldn't wince at that?

"What an awful thing to say to a boy," said Bernie Gaidosch, professor of English at George Brown College in Toronto. "But, yes, it's true. I'm afraid it is true."

It's never been more true. The Standard Aptitude Test is adding an essay question next spring, and judging by the sample posted online, it won't be easy.

Jefferson County public schools already are gearing up for the challenge. Critical and analytical writing will be emphasized in seminars offered next fall.

"We'll have more of a focus on writing that asks (students) to take a whole and break it down into parts," said Brandy Corbin, who teaches English at Pleasure Ridge Park High School and Introduction to College Writing at the University of Louisville.

"We'll also focus more on the traditional three-point-five essay — a five-paragraph essay with an introduction, three supporting points and a conclusion. That's the most common kind of writing at the college level."

Doing it well, however, is fairly uncommon. Only 22 percent of high school seniors scored at the "proficient" level on the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test.

When you don't have the write stuff

Gaidosch said students' inability to express themselves clearly in writing is a three-pronged problem.

As a teacher with 28 years of classroom experience, Gaidosch has watched his students' writing proficiency steadily decline.

As a business consultant, he has heard employers' complaints steadily increase. They say too many young job applicants, even those with college degrees, lack the basic verbal skills necessary to thrive in a corporate environment.

As a concerned educator who has spent a lot of time trying to figure out what went wrong, he believes that our school systems, Canada's and the United States' alike, are primarily to blame for overemphasizing multiple-choice tests and other ways of measuring mere information regurgitation.

"The result is our students are hurting," Gaidosch said. "Most of them feel they aren't adequate to live up to our expectations. They want to do well in school, but most of them simply don't know how."

Gaidosch believes he can show them.

In 2002, he self-published two books aimed at improving the average student's ability to write and study, two underappreciated cornerstones of a solid education, Gaidosch believes.

"The Professor's Secrets: Breaking the Silence" is one man's wakeup call to a world that loves to yap about every aspect of pre-adulthood but the kids' education.

Or lack thereof.

"If you're a so-called expert on kids having sex or doing drugs or hanging out at the mall, you can get yourself on the radio in a heartbeat," Gaidosch said. "On this topic, nothing."

That's changing, actually.

Gaidosch, the genteel evangelist, is an increasingly popular guest on metropolitan talk-radio shows. He estimates he's made about 150 appearances since the debut of his books, one subtitled "How to Get Top Marks on Tests and Exams" and the other "How to Write Essays and Term Papers."

The Professor, his "Secrets" and, more important, his message, are after two years "finally starting to crack through" the public consciousness, Gaidosch said.

Gaidosch knows he and his books won't change the vast public education system at work in North America. His goals are modest and reasonable.

No. 1, to teach college, high school and perhaps even middle school students how to craft an essay and study for a test, skills so basic that "there's just an assumption that kids will pick it up," Gaidosch said. "Well, most of them don't."

No. 2, to spark more discussion of education on both sides of the border.

Professor Bernie, who aspires to become "the Dr. Phil of education," wants parents and potential employers to know that the kids are all right.

"These kids are smart, but we need to appreciate that they live in an intensely visual, oral and aural world," Gaidosch said. "They are ... bombarded with words and sounds and images."

Consequently, kids today are better at talking, watching and listening (sometimes) than they are at reading and writing.

"To hear a typical 10th-grader talk, you'd think he was grade 12 or higher," Gaidosch said. "But his written work is probably equivalent to grade 7."

An exaggeration? Probably not.

George Brown College, a public institution of 10,000 students, gives its incoming freshmen a diagnostic test that evaluates their vocabulary, composition skills and study skills.

"The fat part of the Bell curve, the range where the skills of most students fall, is grade 8 and 9," Gaidosch said. "I told that to a colleague at Buffalo (N.Y.) State University and she said, 'Oh, that's pretty good. A lot of our freshmen test at grade 6 or 7.'"

Gaidosch thinks the decline in writing skills began when public schools embraced the "whole language" method in the 1980s.

Instead of teaching the particulars of grammar, the approach encourages children to focus on whole words and to draw meaning from the context of those words within sentences.

That's how children learn to speak. So, it was presumed that this approach was the best, or most natural, way for children to learn to read and write.

Whether that's actually the case has been a subject of much debate. But Gaidosch, while not condemning the whole language approach, believes it nudged students down a slippery slope that diminished the traditional role of writing in the classroom.

"I just heard about a 12th-grade English class where the senior project was a poster board," Gaidosch said. "So you see, some kids aren't even learning to write in English class."

That's seldom the case in Kentucky, which strongly has emphasized the development of writing skills since the Kentucky Educational Reform Act was passed in 1990.

Jefferson County public school students begin in kindergarten to fill folders with writing samples. In grades 4, 7 and 12, students submit a formal portfolio of their writing: essays, book reviews, short stories and such.

These portfolios are the state's means of evaluating language skills, and they are generally considered to be a more accurate measuring stick than the traditional multiple-choice test. The makers of the SAT evidently agree.

PRP sophomore KayleighRoberts, 16, welcomes the change: "I'm much better in English than math, so I see the new essay requirement as a way to improve my score. I think I'll do well on it."

A bright spot in Kentucky

Thanks to KERA, Kentucky students should be relatively well-prepared for the SAT's new wrinkle.

The innovative portfolio approach has produced salutary results on the whole. Dottie Willis, writing specialist for Jefferson County Public Schools, said there has been a steady increase in Kentucky's score on the National Assessment of Educational Progress test (aka "the nation's report card").

In the last test, Kentucky fourth-graders and eighth-graders ranked in the middle of the national pack, a solid improvement on the state's historical back-of-the-pack standing.

Willis credits the progress to a writing program that was singled out as "a bright spot ... (that) treats writing as a meaningful and serious pursuit for students," said University of Chicago professor George Hillocks Jr., author of "The Testing Trap: How State Writing Assessments Control Learning."

"We place a great deal of emphasis on the critical thinking part of writing," Willis said. "For example, we encourage book reviews instead of book reports because a review involves critical thinking and analysis instead of just a summary."

Amen to that, Professor Bernie says. But he seeks to move the focus away from grades and national tests onto the real-world rewards for good writing.

"Successful people know how to express themselves clearly in speech and in writing," Gaidosch said. "The business leaders I hear from say, 'Give us graduates who can read, write and think well enough to do good research. Those people are our future corporate leaders.'"

Professor Bernie said his "Secrets" provide a leg-up for students of any age who are serious about climbing the business ladder.

"But my books are only a short-term answer," Gaidosch said. "The schools need to do a better job of teaching writing, and they have to realize that study skills aren't something that most kids just pick up.

"Until some real changes are made, I'll still be running around like the little Dutch kid plugging his finger in the dike."

More information is available at www.profsecrets.com and www.collegeboard.com.

Gaidosch’s workbooks are available by calling toll free (877) 439-3999 or through his Web site at www.profsecrets.com.

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