Listlessness

Cupcake is in 4th grade. That means more spelling words. It does not mean a more thoughtful or accurate selection of spelling words, just more. Fortunately, we get the list ahead of time, so we’re able to start studying before the pretest. Sometimes, Cupcake has a hard week. Not just school, but she continues to work hard to stay on top of her autoimmune disorder. Some days she just feels listless. I never want to push with word study, but her Mama encourages it. Not only does she do better on her spelling work; she also really listens to our study, really leans in.

This week she is working with 20 words that all have /eɪ/, or ‘long a.’ The list had 7 different spellings for /eɪ/, distributed as follows:

<a>        : 1 word

<ay>      : 3 words
<ai>       : 5 words
<a_e>    : 6 words
<ea>      : 2 words
<e.igh>  : 1 word
<ey>      : 2 words

 

There’s no rhyme or reason to this distribution, just more footprints from the Assumption of Phonological Primacy. Some of the words weren’t even all that familiar to Cupcake: bail, graze, slate. So we checked in with meaning. Only two words have plus signs, so we made note of those. We organized them according to patterns (graphemes). We looked for bigger patterns and color coded them (final digraphs, medial digraphs, etymological governances…)

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We studied each word, looking for relatives and reasoning through the spellings. We clarified that there’s no such thing as an *<eigh>, that the <e> is the grapheme and the <igh> is a marker, marking (among other things) a relationship to its 3rd or 4th cousin, the , in octave, octopus, octet

Then we zeroed in on the in . Ache is not spelled like other words in that it has two consonant letters between the <aand the replaceable <e>, not just one. Typically, when a <ch> spells /k/, the word it’s in has a Greek origin (like monarch or chrome or chrysanthemum), but ache is Germanic.  It did not evolve with the same spelling as simmilar Old English verbs like bacan (bake), tacan (take), macian (make). The Old English verb acan should’ve become *<ake> in Modern English, but it didn’t.

Why not?

I showed Cupcake and her Mama the Mactionary, which explains, “The modern spelling is largely due to Dr. [Samuel] Johnson, who mistakenly assumed its derivation to be from Greek akhos ‘pain’.” The Online Etymology Dictionary gave us a little more information, which you can go read for yourself. We did this all on Sunday.

Mama texted me on Monday afternoon to tell me the following:

“[Cupcake] gets into the car after school, and as she was changing to go to dance tells me about her spelling. She missed 10 on the pretest… She honestly didn’t seem too bothered, which is great! We have time to keep studying.

“She said,  ‘I told my teacher.” I asked what she told her and she said, ‘You know, about the <ch> in ache!’ I asked what she told her and she recounted what she learned yesterday and even said that the writer thought it was a Greek word and it was actually a mistake! Her teacher commented that was really cool and asked her to share it with the class.

“So here stood [Cupcake]…sharing a slice of knowledge she just learned. Her classmates were like, ‘Whoa! No way!’

“She was just so dang proud of herself. Studying [this way] is life-giving! It’s changing her!”

This kiddo got 10 wrong on the pretest, but ache wasn’t one of them. Neither was eight. Those words had anchors to hold their spellings in her memory, real structural pieces and sense-making patterns with stories attached. Poor kiddo spelled graze right, then changed the < z > to an < s >, I think because I showed her that it was related to grass.

What will hold for her is not missing words on a pretest, or even getting an A on a test-test. What will hold for her is the story of this word, the stories of words, not with some silly, abstract language experience nuance, but in real, structured ways that make sense. The story is anchored in the four questions, which are anchored in our humanity.

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Lists are attempts to go broad, to throw a bunch of examples together without any elegance to tie them together.

Lists are not intended to go deep, not designed or intended to be elegant. Lists are intended to take any thought or discernment out of study: “Here, do this!” they say. “Doesn’t matter why or how, but there will be a test on Friday.” No one becomes a teacher out of a love of lists, though the profession from afar certainly smacks of schedomania.

It’s my job, in working with a kiddo and her spelling lists, to bring sense and elegance and depth to the study. Depth takes time; the word scholarship means ‘being at ease,’ not ‘racing against the clock’ or ‘cramming in as much as possible before the pretest’ or ‘putting it on a poster and selling it.’ I appreciate that Cupcake’s Mama said, “We have time to keep studying,” because things take the time they take.

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I have eight or ten kiddos right now, depending on exactly how you count, and what have means. A couple of them aren’t really mine, but I’m helping their teachers in  mentorships. The mentorships have been a great way to help a teacher make a transition from phonics to facts, and to help launch new student-teacher partnerships on solid footing. I had a great session this week with one of them, waaaaay off in Nova Scotia, with a super cool 4th grader who has warmed up to word study like butter on a baked potato over our 3 mentoring sessions.

“NOTICE how he starts out, for example, with ,” I wrote to the mentee after our session, “saying kinda whatever — *<s-i-h-g> — and we can retrain that and help him notice those patterns [like <igh>].” We do that just by practicing announcing word sums for now. She responded:

“Yes I totally noticed that.  I also notice that you have a definite plan of concepts that you cover in a fairly fluid order, based on feedback that you get from the kid.  Your ease of transition from concept to concept is smooth and effortless.  This work should ebb and flow.  Yesterday, for example, when he gave you the oral feedback to
accurately identify the base and the pronunciation changes with , you made a decision to continue with bound bases yesterday.”I love how you introduce new material casually and then leave it.  And then review it.  It is masterful to watch.  I need to improve how I spiral back to concepts.”Grateful for scholarship!  That was such a great session!”

It was. It really was a great session. She described the kiddo as “half sponge and half Energizer Bunny.” He’s a cool kid, athletic, laid back, creative. But I’ve watched him lean in to this word study. He was prepared to be unimpressed before our first session, I think, but that didn’t stick.

This kiddo hasn’t had any lists for us to work from, at least not yet, so we just work from the language. I’m flexible.

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I have six schools, districts, or administrative educational offices that I’m working with this year, as well as a couple of university professors who hire me as a guest lecturer. I have a seventh educational office engaging me to deliver online professional development to teacher throughout a large geographic region, and I’ve had inquiries from two more entities about next year. In March, I will speak at a conference in greater Chicago, along with Douglas Harper and Peter Bowers.

I also have additional persons and entities attempting to engage me for services that I do not offer, like proofreading, private development for individual professionals who always say they’re too busy to take my classes (but still want to magically understand what I understand), writing up detailed bids for work or proposals for conferences for the chance at a maybe (LOL — no thanks), and “tutoring” (i.e. babysitting) kids without any parent or tutor mentoring or other adult involvement.

People new to my work often assume that they’re the first person to think of a particular question for me. “Is there a book/curriculum?” or “What resource do you recommend?” or “Where can I find a list of base elements…?” It’s ultimately the same question no matter who asks it: “Can you inject me (or my staff) with all the answers so that we don’t have to invest any time in developing an understanding?”

The answer is No.

When people ask me to recommend a resource, I send them links to my blog and my web store. Honestly, why people who do not own all my products and who have never taken a class with me ask me what I recommend is beyond me. It’s not like I’m just regurgitating information I read in some All-Time Linguistics Compendium of Answers and just hiding it from everyone. When I have a question about language, I don’t go look in one place and read the orange print. A Master List of Morphemes doesn’t exist, nor should it, because English has a million words, and the point is to teach men to fish, not to keep handing out lists of 20 fishes every week and having fish tests on Friday.

You want my secret, People? OK! Listen up, ’cause here it comes:

Study.

Study other languages. Travel and practice and learn to speak and read them. Get an advanced degree in linguistics from one of the finest academic institutions on the planet. Study with famous genius linguists in the US and abroad. Get trained and certified in the best practices in education. Push past that training and certification and study further. Present at conference. Tutor hundreds of kiddos. Train and supervise hundreds of teachers. Study thousands of kiddos’ data. Keep your certificates current.  Go to France. Go to Canada. Upend everything you thought you already knew. Shout it from the rooftops. Go back to grad school, to study linguistics again, but differently this time. Create a teaching internship in orthography. Start a business. Go back to France. Research, develop, design, and publish several print resources. Research, develop, and teach online seminars. Continue to maintain your credentials. Continue to study words. Learn new languages, at least their writing systems. Study study study. Take time.

If you want a collection of morphological analyses you can trust, I have a few for sale in my webstore.  If you already own them, crack them open. They do not work if you don’t study them. If you want a collection of words you can start with, I have a few for sale in my webstore. If you already own them, and they’re sitting on a shelf, well, that’s just silly.

I’m not saying that everyone has to lead an identical life to mine, but I am highlighting the fact that my understanding is unique and uncommon and not available in some other place. It’s all out there — I didn’t invent the writing system. But asking me for a Definitive Resource just masks a desperate need for a false sense of security. People sometimes tell me I have an ego problem, but in my estimation, the real ego problem is in the educator who believes they have a right to know and understand things they haven’t studied.

I use lists all the time in my study. I don’t make lists, but I use lists. People bring me lists, or maybe I take them from somewhere. I invite my students — kiddos or adults — to psych out the listmakers with me. What were they thinking? I ask. What do we understand that the listmaker does not?

When teachers or administrators or PD professionals ask me for list, I tell them that they can use any list they want. They just need to bring a real understanding to it, and that takes time. If you want to understand what I understand, study with me. There are a variety of ways to do that. But none of them is on some list or in some book that some other person wrote.
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There are at least 4 different <list> base elements from at least 3 different sources, all Germanic. One is archaic and related to listen and loud. A second denotes ‘desire, will,’ but is rarely used on its own; it’s related to lust and lascivious and it’s the base element of the title of this post. Clever, huh? The third <list> denotes ’tilt, lean, incline,’ like a boat listing to one side. That may be related to the lusty one, but its exact origin is unknown / disputed.

The fourth, the most common <list>, the one that we find in spelling list and shopping list and list price and list a property, that one is Germanic like the others, but the senses it has now are a convergence of an Old English word and a French word of the same historical origin. The Old English word meant ‘cloth border, hem, fringe,’ a stripe, a strip of fabric. By the time the Old French version made its way into English in the 13th century, the world was growing more literate, and the word had taken associations with paper and writing — a strip or border of paper, not just cloth.

The associations between cloth, paper, and associated activities are everywhere. Look at text, texture, textile, context.  Look at map and napkin. Look at toilet, toilette, and toile. And bureau.

Anyhow.

A list is nothing special, people. It’s a scrap. A strip. Fringe. It’s an incomplete document. It’s a placeholder. People might say that they make lists to help them remember, but in reality, we make lists so we can allow ourselves to forget. No one actually remembers all the shopping lists they’ve made. They’re thrown out, discarded, scraps, remnants. They are edges that remain on the edges. We don’t frame lists. We don’t keep them as mementos. We don’t give them as gifts.

There’s nothing special about lists. But when we bring our well-trained brains to the table, when we study and engage and take time to notice what’s the listmakers were thinking, we can continue to quilt together a deeper, bigger, better understanding.

No bellyaching, just study.

6 Comments

  1. Brad says:

    Gina, this post is such a roller coaster ride. The head; the heart. The laughter; the tears. The anger; the joy. But never the apathy. Never, no never, the apathy with Gina Cooke. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s all right here. Breathe. Close Eyes. Leap.

  2. Lisa Mills says:

    Gina; Haven’t written in a while, but I was reviewing some of your past blog entries and they reminded me of a question I have had from my kiddos. I have been trying to research the spelling of the word YOU. I know of a couple resources where I can go – your grapheme cards, etymonline, and real spelling. What are some other resources I can access to research spelling questions?

    Lisa Mills

  3. Julie Duncan says:

    Hi Gina. I’m new to all of this and am fascinated by what you said about the ‘ugh’ being a marker, “marking (among other things) a relationship to its 3rd or 4th cousin, the ‘c’, in octave, octopus, octet.” Do you have a post that goes into more detail about this?

    • Hi Julie. I write a lot about markers — you can type ‘marker’ in the search bar on the blog and find other articles. But I don’t think there is an article specifically about markers.

      If you want to know more the best thing to do is to take my classes — especially The Science of Silence.

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