Why Teach Kids "Unpractical" and "Useless Words" ?
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I have never encountered the word brobdingnagian in a sentence, and I highly doubt it will be on the SATs. My ten-year-old daughter will probably have little immediate use for anthropomorphism, truculent, or prolix. She is unlikely to encounter them on the W.A.S.L (Washington State Assessment of Learning) that her friends prepared for all spring. But then again, she won't have to prepare for the test either. This is because my daughter loves words.
I have never encountered the word brobdingnagian in a sentence, and I highly doubt it will be on the SATs. My ten-year-old daughter will probably have little immediate use for anthropomorphism, truculent, or prolix. She is unlikely to encounter them on the W.A.S.L (Washington State Assessment of Learning) that her friends prepared for all spring. But then again, she won’t have to prepare for the test either. This is because my daughter loves words.
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reading proficiency amongst fourth graders has not increased since 1980, and 37% of fourth graders were below a basic level of proficiency as of 2000.
This raises some sticky questions. The most obvious of course is, where did we go wrong? But for me it raises a personal question: should I, of all people, be using statistics drawn from standardized testing to make my point? Because that would be pretty damn hypocritical.
Let me explain. I have an eight-year-old daughter, Adora, who published her first book last year at age seven. My ten-year-old daughter Adrianna is currently reading both Anna Karenina and Chekhov, and has won several awards for her poetry, which is simultaneously abstract and lyrical. I am not taking credit for my daughters’ achievement: they learn on their own.
This wasn’t always the case, of course. It was necessary to give them the impetus to explore. This meant looking for something beyond the realm of the ordinary. Kids love the impractical, the fantastic, the ridiculous, the strange.
So when I began to teach my daughters vocabulary, I looked for just that. I didn’t worry about what was going to be on the W.A.S.L, I didn’t set my sites on the far-away SAT. I thought about what was odd enough to catch their attention: funny sounding words, disgusting words, words that would wake them up, words that embodied the joy of language, words that hearkened to piracy, to space travel, to magic. Scurrilous, ribald, effervescent, tumescent, mordacious, virago. I taught them the difference between skulk and lurk, and other ways to describe someone who was stultifying. They wrote descriptions of charlatans, transcribed insipid conversations, and wrote poems about philatelists. They would never use most of these words, but at the same time these words would become their greatest tool.
Teaching them that words were funny, that words afforded a full spectrum, that words could be played with, engendered a love for words and a natural enthusiasm for learning.
Teachers often do not have the luxury of using such methods. Our plan to combat our students’ linguistic failures is stifling the very exuberance that might lead to success; working under the specter of standardized testing creates a learning environment that is at its best rigid, and at its worst gives students the idea that writing is nothing more than a series of rules and vocabulary a parade of dull synonyms.
My daughter took the W.A.S.L test just like all of her peers. No, she may never have any need for any of the words I taught her, but there’s something rewarding about hearing a eight-year-old describe standardized test questions as ‘banal’.
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