Are you gullible?

Every week I write five vocabulary words on the board, and on Monday we talk about the words, their spellings and meanings. Does the word have a root that is recognizable, as in servile, which means servant-like? Or, is the word identifiable because of its foreign language derivative, like amity, meaning friendship, coming from the Latin amicus, and evolving into both Spanish and French words for friend, amigo and ami?

This process is supposed to be a learning tool, not just a cram the gray matter activity in which students memorize the words for the quiz on Friday and then they become soundly and totally lost in space.

Invariably, every year students complain: "What do we have-ta learn these words for? We'll never use them again anyway."

I tell them the ACT test preparers recommend this list as those that juniors should know. And, I add, "What if someone else uses them? Don't you want to know what he or she is talking about?"

"Nobody in their right mind would use these words," they tell me.

To prove them wrong, I dangle extra credit points for those who run across the words in our reading or in their lives. A few swallow the bait and find the words in song lyrics and commercials of all places. I tell them how I even heard two of them on "Dancing with the Stars" last week. Len, the British judge, said one of the dances was ephemeral, and then went on to say one dancer was an enigma.

They are soooo not impressed.

At the start of the year, I prepared sentences with one of the vocabulary words missing and with a multitude of mechanical errors so we could review the words and grammar rules as well as students viewed them on a transparency. I soon found this was more work for me than it was for them. Not a good teaching practice.

So, now I save a portion of the board where they can write their own sentences with the words used appropriately. This is working much better.

Last week they were taking their Friday test, and just to mess with them, I told them "gullible," which was one of the vocab words, was written in small letters on the ceiling.

"Yeah, right," several of them said and grinned.

I told Lindsey to come up and I'd show it to her, and she said, "No," and I could tell she was afraid of being thought a fool---gullible.

I tried with several others, and no one believed me. Finally, I led Alec by the arm and pointed to the exact place on the ceiling. Reluctantly, he looked up and a grin spread over his face.

At first, they even thought Alec was in on it. But, they couldn't resist looking and soon the whole class flocked to that area of the room, looking at "gullible" and laughing.

A number of years ago, a clever student, one whose identity I never did discover wrote it on the ceiling. Maybe it was a prank to see if I'd notice, or maybe he or she did it to cheat on the test to ensure it was spelled correctly.

"How could someone write on the ceiling without you noticing?"

"I must have been out of the room and gullible enough to trust someone I shouldn't have."