What started as a normal Tuesday morning…
I began my day working with one of my brilliant third grade students. Let’s call him TR. TR did a great job reading a grade level passage to me. As he was reading, I noticed the word <enormous>. TR and I talked about what that word meant in our passage, and then he realized humongous and gigantic would be similar in meaning. When looking at <humungous>, TR noticed the suffix <-ous> was also in <enormous>, and with that I saw it—the base element <norm>. So, as I often do, I wondered aloud if this could be the same <norm> as in <normal>. TR thought the base was the same, so we jumped in and began to explore. By seeing the word <humongous> we had evidence of the suffix <-ous>. Of course as we were looking at <enormous> we saw two other words with the same suffix! (Isn’t that the way it happens? Once we notice one thing, we tend to notice the same thing all day long.) TR and I hypothesized the word sum to be <e+norm+ous>. We also hypothesized <normal> to be <norm+al>. That’s all fine and dandy, but what does <norm> mean? As TR looked up <enormous> and <normal> using etymonline.com, we discovered that our thinking was accurate, and we discovered that <norm> has the sense and meaning of “a standard, pattern, or model.”
I could go on and on explaining the many different connections TR and I had today. However, TR is an artist, so he did a quick sketch to portray <normal> and <enormous>.
As you look at his picture, let me highlight a few things:
Last week we explored <adjective>, which is broken down as <ad+ject+ive>. <ad> means “to” and <ject> has the denotation of “throw.” What does an adjective do? I’ll let you ponder that one. Today TR noticed that the word <enormous> was listed as an adjective. In our story, the truck was enormous. Wait…are we “throwing” information towards the noun to better describe the noun?
Etymonline.com states the following about <-ous>: “Word-forming element making adjectives from nouns, meaning ‘having, full of, having to do with…”
The prefix <e-> is an assimilated form of <ex-> and means “out of.”
TR and I had already seen the suffix <-al> before, and we knew it had the sense and meaning of “related to, pertaining to.”
So what does enormous and normal mean? I love the definition TR developed for <enormous> -- greatly outside the standard. TR went on to hypothesize normal as “related to the standard.” AFTER coming up with his own definition, just by analyzing the elements in <normal>, TR looked up the definition. Here is what he found: “Normal—Conforming to the standard or common type…serving to an established standard” (dictionary.com).
Remember how I mentioned once you notice something you seem to keep noticing it? Tonight I opened up an email article I had sent myself a few weeks ago, and guess what jumped off the page? You guessed it—the word normal!
The article, He didn’t learn to read until 12. Then he graduated from an Ivy. Here’s his advice, gets real pretty quickly as it shares the story of Jonathan Mooney. The author states, “At 12 years old, [Mooney] still couldn’t read. His father told him he would most likely be a high school dropout. A counselor told him he would end up unemployed. One teacher told him he would wind up in jail. Illiterate and discouraged, he even made a plan for suicide.”
Mooney is often asked how he went from a sixth grade drop-out to an Ivy league graduate. Mooney states, “It’s not the difference that’s the problem, it’s the way the difference is treated.” In recounting Mooney’s story, the author shares, “[Mooney] remembers when his school counselor called his mother and him into her office to get his dyslexia diagnosis in third grade. His recollection was that everyone in the office stopped, stood silently, and watched he and his mom walk in with the counselor — as if to get tragic news… ‘We were there to mourn the death of my normality…but the mindset that normal is good is part of the problem.’”
Pause. “The mindset that normal is good is part of the problem.” What does that mean? What does normal mean? Let’s briefly revisit the definition my brilliant third grader arrived at by analyzing the elements in <normal>—normal is related to the standard. Hmm... what’s the standard, and do we really just want standard?
The article continues…
Mooney alluded to research that shows people with atypical attention are better problem solvers. But he doesn’t remember being celebrated as a problem solver…[Mooney] challenged the idea that a child’s ability to comply with the mandate to sit still makes the student good or normal…[Mooney] understood the feeling that you have to conform to a pre-determined set of ideas and standards to be considered smart — and that failure to do so means you need to be fixed.
There is much more to this article, and you may want to take the time to read it. However, as I end let me circle back to where I began. Reading and noticing the word <enormous> led my student and I to noticing these elements within other words. I love how Sue Hegland discussed this idea at the recent IDA conference in Portland, Oregon. She said, “It’s not about learning that word but seeing the statistical patterns in the language showing up all over the place; showing how the writing system works.” I’ve heard it said that we can’t un-see what we’ve seen. I’m sure I will continue to see <norm> everywhere for a bit. My brilliant student already noticed it in enormity and enormousness, and it certainly jumped off the page of this article I was reading tonight. What a joy to explore words with brilliant young minds.