My daughter Leilani is a junior in college and plans to graduate in Anthropology with a minor in English. She was struggling with a passage in one of her books and asked me if I would help her with it. Now her books are all pretty deep into philosophy so they are replete with large vocabulary words that I don’t see often and a few I have never seen. So in order to try to help her, I had to backtrack a bit – much to her dismay – and figure out what was going on in the 2 previous pages.
I found myself at quite the disadvantage because I didn’t know the meaning of some of the words, so I asked Leilani if she knew what they meant. No, was her answer. I looked at her in amazement, how can you begin to figure out what the passage means if you don’t know the meaning of all the words in the passage? Well, I can pretty much figure out what they mean just by the other words around them, was her reply. But when we put that to the test, she found out she was wrong. So I had a teaching opportunity there that I just couldn’t resist, even though it would probably fall on deaf ears because she was only interested in me telling her what the passage meant. She wasn’t interested in how she might figure that out for herself and then have a better chance of remembering it the next time.
However, being the Mom I am, I snatched the opportunity anyway and got out our huge Oxford Dictionary. We proceeded to look up all the horribly long words. I was happy to see that she was jotting down the meanings of the words. Then I ventured to suggest that because this was her major, and these words would probably pop up again and because she might not want to carry the Oxford Dictionary around with her (they aren’t found in any of the smaller dictionaries we own), if she would just write the words down in the vocabulary section of her Literary Journal, they would be so easy to refer to again, both for spelling when she used them herself and for quick reference the next time she came across them. I also went just a little further and suggested that her notes for her core Anthropology Classes might be useful to her in the future and she could also file them under topic in the same Journal.
The teaching moment was seized upon and made enough of an impact on an independent mind that she might consider giving it a try. Perhaps a scholar she will yet be!