What’s the Good Word for the Day? : Venice High Students Broaden Vocabularies

The word last Wednesday at Venice High School was demoniac.

At lunchtime, 16-year-old Christina Rounds approached Venice Principal Andrea L. Natker and said, “Her demoniac attitude caused the younger children to act poorly.”

It wasn’t the snappiest conversation starter ever, but it won Christina a Snickers bar. She had used Venice’s word of the day properly in a sentence. She had demonstrated she knew that demoniac means “influenced by a demon, like a fiend.”

Four years ago, the Westside high school began publishing a word of the day in its daily announcement bulletin. The daily word was the brainchild of Venice teachers Beverly Broger, Charlotte Ferreghy and others, who thought it would be a painless way to help students build better vocabularies. Today, the daily word is as much a fixture of Venice High life as the school’s famous statue of alumna Myrna Loy.

Weekly Quizzes

In addition to being published in the daily bulletin, the word of the day is posted on a bulletin board in the school’s main hallway. In the classroom, teachers write the word on the blackboard and find other ways to incorporate it into their lessons. Some give weekly quizzes on the spelling and meaning of the daily words.

During recesses, designated school staff give Word Wizard cards to the first 20 students who can remember the day’s word and use it correctly. Principal Natker is new this year at Venice High, and she finds distributing the cards an excellent way to meet the student body. “Have you used your word today?” she asked students laughing with their friends over lunch.

On Wednesday, Natker deemed 17-year-old Daniel Smith a Word Wizard after he said, “ ‘Friday the 13th’ is a very demoniac movie.” Kathleen Coyne, 17, got a card after she pronounced, “Her demoniac ways were influenced by her Satanic clothing.”

The students write their names on the cards and exchange them for a candy bar or other treat. At the end of the semester, the name of one of the daily Word Wizards will be drawn and he or she will win a stereo.

Grant Pays for Prizes

A grant of $800 from the Los Angeles Educational Partnership’s Small Grants for Teachers program pays for the prizes. The partnership, a nonprofit organization that channels private-sector money into public education, made the award to Broger, Ferreghy and colleague Gertrude Williams.

Broger and Williams, who draw up the list of daily words, began the school year with jubilation. They try to include challenging words, which is why opsimath , which means “a person who begins to learn late in life,” was chosen. And they try to tailor words to the season or to special campus events. Demoniac was one of a string of Halloween words that included ghoul, exhume and hallowed.

Neither the teachers nor the students claim that the daily words have changed their lives. “We don’t actually use them,” 14-year-old Sonia Castro said. “We don’t actually talk with them.” As Sonia’s friend Monica Palma, 15, explained, “They’re too long.”

But Williams and her colleagues are confident that even if the students don’t chat in the corridors about demoniac opsimaths, they may recognize the words some day when they see them in print, in a book or on a Scholastic Aptitude Test.

Test Scores Rose

As Natker pointed out, Venice High’s average score on the verbal section of the SAT rose from 421 to 425 between 1983 and 1988. While modest, that increase is probably more significant than it appears because more students took the test, which tends to drive scores down as a greater number of average students participate.

According to Anne Grosso, an official with the College Board in New York City, which sponsors the SAT, students who get high scores on the verbal section of the test have usually built their vocabularies by reading widely over a long period of time and taking rigorous courses. Vocabulary drills, Grosso said, “are not going to produce extravagant increases in scores.” On the other hand, she noted, an exercise like the daily word “can’t hurt.”

Williams said so many students have already qualified as Word Wizards that the school may have to schedule a run-off vocabulary test to narrow the field of finalists for the stereo. “That way, we’ll see if they really know the word or if they are just using the word for the day,” the teacher said, smiling demoniacally.