College Essay: Education Is Not a Luxury, But It Should Be Free

College Essay: Education Is Not a Luxury, But It Should Be FreeOne of the best ways to teach college students is by making them earn a TOEFL essay topic in writing. After all, it's not that easy to write essays, and even harder to write one in English. The TOEFL test in writing, the requirement for receiving scores, and the word 'essay' are all too often conflated in teaching materials and even the real TOEFL essay sample exam is seen as an essay in the true sense of the word, rather than a sample one.Another problem with the TOEFL, or the test in writing, is that the professionals offering the test in colleges and universities and even test makers themselves seem to make no distinction between it and the 'real' essay in English. In doing so, they cause students who know little about writing to have a great deal of difficulty in learning how to write an essay.It is important that teaching people know that there is something very different about the TOEFL essay. It is not just a subje ct on a test. It is a topic or idea in writing. Students learn this as they go through the TOEFL test in writing, and they are encouraged to write better essays when they learn about it.It is not true that the topic of an essay has to be accurate. The topic has to be an idea in writing, not a fact. This means the writer must be aware of the reader's interest, he or she must understand why the idea is important, and he or she must be able to show how it fits into the meaning of the essay in order to persuade the reader to accept the idea, because if the student cannot do any of these things, then the writing is not an essay at all.It's also not true that the topic of an essay has to be consistent throughout the course of the essay. Since the idea in writing is so important, the student must learn to understand the nature of an essay, and the elements it needs. It's much easier to follow than a page-long list of facts, and it makes the student more productive as well.The lesson here i s that we must fight the myth that the TOEFL is a 'simplified'easy' English test, because it is not! It is not the case that education is not a Lucury, it is a Lucury that must be earned! It is true that it takes a lot of effort and skill to write a good essay, but it's also true that education is not a luxury.Teachers can make it a part of their curriculum to use the essay as a learning tool instead of teaching students that they need to buy it when they graduate and 'earn' it by completing it, and they should know that if they do so, then they will see more students eager to learn what they know about the TOEFL essay and to see more students learning to write essays that are worthy of college students. And students are much more likely to learn this if they know that learning to write a good essay is a real skill that they can master, rather than being taught that it is something they will 'earn' later on.Education is not a Lucury, so students can learn this fact if they make it p art of their syllabus instead of teaching them to believe that education is a Lucury. By teaching them how to write a good essay instead of wasting their time and theirs, teachers can make their teaching as valuable as possible to their students.