Vocabulary Boot Camp and the Nobel Prize for Literature

(Note: all SAT words used in this blogpost are presented in red text)

I start the class by writing the word EMOTICON on the whiteboard—followed by the symbol J and the characters  :-)).

“Can you figure out how the word EMOTICON  was created? 

It's in the dictionary now for the first time!

Any ideas on where it came from?

My audience is a group of high school students who would rather be anywhere else than a classroom on a Saturday morning.

They are here in a Palo Alto SAT learning center doing vocabulary drills for the College Board’s highly competitive Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).  Most of them are learning a lot of new words in a very short amount of time, which is why these sessions are referred to as “boot camp”. They need high scores to get into the Ivy League colleges and the University of California state schools--the UCs.

The students and I will  be judged and rewarded by how much practice test scores and real scores increase.  And the ultimate reward will be acceptance at a great college. But (sigh) I also naively want them to learn to love words the way that I do.  I want them to understand that words are symbols for thinking and feeling and learning—for human civilization itself.

I say this at the first class. They roll their eyes the way that I do when my yoga teacher reads inspiring quotes as she has us do the downward dog pose.

(At least she can’t see me roll me eyes at her—because if I am doing the pose correctly, I am facing downward)

But in either the SAT or the yoga class situation, you know the look.

It is the one that says: Can we just do the exercises and go home?

The students are not sure if they should memorize EMOTICON—which, by the way is not an SAT word—at least not yet.

But I waste five precious minutes talking about EMOTICON anyway.                    

Um…just for fun?

The students usually get that the word EMOTICON comes from the root word emotion. They are less likely to conclude that the word is a combination of the word emotion and the word icon.

How cool is that?

I start with EMOTICON because I want students to understand that they live in a time when new exciting words are rapidly entering the dictionary—words that may be based on older, more mundane words.

This is quite a challenge since SAT vocabulary words have not changed much since I myself first took the exam in 1973. As I revisited the prodigious list—there were the usual suspects—alacrity, bellicose, charlatan, diaphanous…all the way through zephyr—the opposite of which is maelstrom.

But oh the stories behind these old words!  I try to share some of them. For example, according to the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, the word zephyr comes from The Greek and Roman god of the west wind, considered the most pleasant of the winds. It is a wind mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey and the name of a baseball team admired by Homer Simpson. I can ride Amtrak’s Zephyr train to Reno or drive a used Lincoln Zephyr.  The word has been around for centuries and is still part of our popular culture.

Well, there went another five minutes on one word when we should have been doing drills.

I also do a great talk on how we got the word Internet—but in the interest of time, I choose to pontificate (great word, but not an SAT word) on one technology term per class.

My hunch is that if you give up Saturday mornings to drill SAT vocabulary words with someone who cares about words, your scores will go up.  But I’m not sure what students will remember a year or years from now either.

Are there any other ways to measure the outcome of Saturdays spent doing word drills? 

Will any of my students one day win a Nobel Prize for Literature or invent something that will add a new word to the dictionary?

I sure hope so. Because, ultimately, the best measure of success, at least for me, would be to train a kid who contributes to a whole new vocabulary for us all.