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.

Testing One Two Three

For the past seven years I had a terrific blog host called Red Room, which was started by a group of San Francisco based writers and editors. Many of them were famous.  Some of them are now Facebook friends.

They invited me to  post for free because I was a librarian who led book groups.  I promoted their books if I liked them.  And I was among the first one hundred people who signed up on an experimental basis.  My blog was called the All Seasons Book Group because my reading themes tend to be seasonal--Anna Karenina in winter, beach reading in summer.







Alas, Red Room is no more--sold to another company.

So here is another attempt at a blog with fewer bells and whistles.
It is an experiment--I have never tried Blogger before.
I am writing it because my Facebook posts are getting too long.
And there's so much I want to tell you!

The blog is called Do You See What I See?
The title is in memory of my Dad who was a great storyteller and observer.
He was also a pianist and entertainer and when he spotted a beautiful woman or beautiful dessert in a bakery case or something completely absurd, his eyes would light up and he would sing that part of the Christmas carol:
Do You See What I See?

I would be at an Italian bakery with him or window shopping on Fifth Avenue or at a party where someone's husband was flirting with someone else's wife and suddenly I would hear Dad singing softly and merrily--Do you see what I see?

I wish I had a recording of Dad  to share with you.
Instead, click here for an Andy Williams version

Keep in mind that Dad sounded more like Mel Brooks than Andy Williams.

Why did he choose this song? Dad was an elementary school teacher back in 1962 and he ran the holiday pageant--the song was done every year and it stayed in his mind. I am not sure that he envisioned a Christmas miracle when he played the song--instead he saw it as a way of pointing out something delightful, joyous or completely ridiculous.

He would never sing the line if he saw something sad.

But I intend to share sad things here, too.

Okay--I am going to hit "publish" now.
Let's see if this works!

P.S. (To digress further--and my blogs always digress)--the formal title of the song is Do You Hear What I Hear?   It was a call for peace, written in 1962 in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The back story is here)