How to prep for the SAT while taking a shower
Or on your iPod, or by reading a comic book. Preparation can be easy – but is it worthwhile?
from the July 12, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 4
Vocabulary Accelerator, by Defined Mind Inc. in New York, serves up rock, hip-hop, and R&B songs on a CD with a workbook of related exercises (www.defmind.com, $25 for the set). One ninth-grade teacher reported that after just a few weeks of incorporating the program into her lessons, her class's average score on vocabulary quizzes went up from 40 to 84 percent.
Joel Heckethorn taught with Vocabulary Accelerator last year in his 10th-grade English class at Eagle Academy for Young Men, a small public school in New York City. His students started asking him to play the CD in the background while they worked on vocabulary and writing assignments, and soon they could spot the words in such literature as Chinua Achebe's "Things Fall Apart."
"I put [many assignments] in the same format that's on the SAT, so they would be familiar with it," Mr. Heckethorn says. "It's something I didn't have in high school ... but I certainly wish I had."
Teenagers, of course, can see through adults' attempts to make learning cool, but the efforts seem to pay off anyway. "My first impression was that the songs were a little corny, but when you listen ... you can understand how they actually use the words in actual conversation," says Ryan Moore, a student of Heckethorn's. "I was always sure that I was going to take the SAT, but I never knew how I could study for the writing part, and the [Vocabulary] Accelerator helped me out a lot."
After years of tutoring students for college admissions, Renée Mazer decided it was time to record some of the wacky poems, songs, and stories she used as vocabulary memory triggers. She created a seven-CD series called Not Too Scary Vocabulary that covers more than 500 words ($49.95). She finds that mnemonics – like understanding that "enmity" is what you might feel for an enemy – are more effective than listening to a song that simply uses the words in context.
"I put in some real dating stories from high school ... my funniest dating stories," she says. "People know I'm trying to be cheesy and goofy ... so they [think], 'I can't believe she has the guts to sing that!' "
For people who do their best singing and remembering in the shower, there are even test-prep shower curtains focused on vocabulary, grammar, or math. (The Intuitive Learning Co. sells them online.)
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