Cooking an award winning essay in your own kitchen    062

Perhaps the number one request I receive from parents is to teach their children how to write essays. It seems students always need help with this and the students themselves agree that essay writing is a specific weakness and they need to learn the techniques. Essay writing seems to have something of the magical about it. Well, considering the rushed pace of teaching in general, and a number of other factors, these perceptions on the part of parents and students are understandable, but they are only partly justifiable, and this is what this blog post is about.

So let’s get into the kitchen and start cooking. But before we do I think we should watch Gordon Ramsay cooking scrambled eggs on YouTube. The video clip is entitled ‘Gordon Ramsay’s scrambled eggs’—Google that—and this simple cooking demonstration has been viewed over 18 million times, which is probably another record for this amazing man. It runs for just over four minutes and you may want to watch it more than once, and I suggest you do. It is quite suitable for family viewing.

Making the perfect scrambled eggs involves obtaining, preparing and then cooking quality ingredients. With such simple ingredients finding them in the first place is easy and preparing them is the work of only seconds, for example breaking the eggs and cutting the bread. But let’s look for a moment at the quality and range of these ingredients. Now most students I teach, when asked about scrambled eggs, can think of perhaps three or possibly four ingredients only. Here are Gordon’s ingredients, some used more than once: olive oil, mushrooms, tomatoes on the vine, salt, pepper, sourdough bread, eggs, butter, creme fraiche and chives. That’s 10 ingredients. The cooking technique, while basic, is particularly purposeful, and Gordon makes this very clear. But it’s also a lesson about the importance of ingredients and preparation. If you watch other Gordon Ramsay shows, such as Kitchen Nightmares for example, he continually emphasises the importance of quality fresh ingredients.

What has all this got to do with essay writing? Actually, everything. A good essay depends upon obtaining sufficient notes or information, and that means range and quality, and then organising these notes into an effective plan. Only then can the cooking or essay writing begin, and there will be no award-winning result unless those ingredients are there and they have been prepared and organised. This is exactly why students believe they have a problem with essay writing—but in reality case the ingredients or information are not there or are of poor quality. So, there’s nothing much to cook.

Now while there are writing techniques to learn the point is that if students had good quality, well organised information, the essay would be much better. However, most children are too lazy to either get and organise the information, or to learn the information. Doing this takes mental effort and perhaps your children have been trying to skip this step. Preparation has to be put into your son or daughter’s essay writing approach. This takes hard work and persistence, usually over an extended period of time, just the sort of pain most students want to avoid.

So, now what? Get your children cooking in the kitchen but following the Gordon Ramsay process. Show them the importance of having quality ingredients and preparing those ingredients, and relate the whole thing to essay writing. In this way there won’t be any problems in the kitchen, and there won’t be any essay writing nightmares either.

All content copyright—Mark Thackray—Australian Educational Services