I Thought That I Was Alone!

Andrew Heinze teaches history at the University of San Francisco. USF was best know for its basketball teams in the mid-1950s that won national championships with Bill Russell and K.C. Jones. USF is middling-good Roman Catholic liberal arts institution, so I was surprised by Heinze's admission that his selectively-admitted students didn't know the meaning of "pessimistic" or "fatalistic" or "opportunistic." These words appeared on one of Heinze's history exams and he was confronted with the reality of stunted vocabularies among his students. At least Heinze's word-challenged student raised her hand and asked a question. At the Collegium Excellens where I labored for more than three decades (groan), most of my students would skip a word they didn't understand and plow ahead. Dictionary, what's that? Just think about Malcolm Little (before his conversion to a variant of Islam: Malcolm X), spent his time in prison memorizing the dictionary, one page at a time. If words are powerful (and I think they are), my students — like Heinze's — were 90-pound weaklings. If this is (fair & balanced) philology, so be it.

What Does 'Vocabulary' Mean?
By Andrew R. Heinze

My student's question caught me off guard: "What's 'pessimistic'?" She smiled meekly and added, "I'm sorry, but I don't know what it means."

She was puzzling over a multiple-choice question about Abraham Lincoln's philosophy of life, and "pessimistic" was one of the choices. I said: "Well, you know the expression about the glass of water being half-full or half-empty? A pessimistic person sees it as half-empty. An optimist sees it as half-full."

She nodded, thanked me, and returned to the test.

My student was born and raised in the United States. I would guess that she comes from a middle-class or upper-middle-class background, like many of her peers at the small, expensive, private university where I teach. Like the vast majority of American colleges, mine does not attract many academically inclined students — the ones who enjoy school and love learning. They usually end up at more prestigious institutions.

Most of the students at colleges like mine are there only because they have to be: Without a bachelor's degree they cannot qualify for jobs that offer reasonably high status or pay. Most of our graduates become technicians, managers, sales representatives, civil servants, or public-school teachers.

I like my students. They are nice, respectful, and willing to work, especially on assignments that will be graded. But I sometimes forget how little they know.

As a history professor, I realize that they are unsure of centuries ("Is the 19th century the 1900s or the 1800s?"), geography ("Is Vermont in the South?"), chronology ("Was the Great Depression before the Civil War?"), and people ("Wasn't Frederick Douglass one of the presidents?"). And as a teacher with quite a few foreign-born students, I know that some will be unfamiliar with idiomatic expressions ("nuts and bolts," "bread and butter," "jumped the gun," "paid the piper").

I am also mindful that even my American-born students have fairly limited vocabularies. So when I use a word that I think they will not know (anomalous, fortuitous, chicanery), I usually follow it up immediately with a definition: "The leaders were guilty of all kinds of chicanery — chicanery means lying and cheating — but they often went unpunished."

But it is only when I get a question like "What's 'pessimistic'?" that I realize how much of what I say in a lecture goes over my students' heads. During the next class meeting, with that question in mind, I stopped myself in the middle of a sentence about Teddy Roosevelt and the ideal of virility. I had used the word "virility" a few times already and hadn't noticed any puzzled looks, but now I paused to ask the 40 young people looking intently at me, "Do you understand the word 'virility'? Do you know what it means?"

At first no hands rose in the air, but after I waited a while, one did. That student said, "I'm not sure, but does it have to do with power — with sexual power, or something?"

I told him, yes, it did have to do with sexual power, and then I asked if anyone knew whether the word applied to men and women, or only to men. Nobody knew.

I asked, "Has anyone studied Latin?" A young woman's hand went up. "Do you remember the word for man?" Tentatively, but correctly, she said it. I then explained to the class why the "vir" in "virility" made it a term for masculine power, and returned to talking about TR, whose cult of power wouldn't have been the same if it had been gender neutral.

But a few minutes later I had another question for my students. In the biography of Roosevelt they were reading, the author noted that young Teddy's schoolmates had chided him for his priggishness. "Prig" appeared several times in the chapter assigned for class that day. So I asked, "Do you know what the word 'prig' means?" No one did.

Obviously the problem is not about "prig," or "virility," or even "pessimistic." It is about the assumption most of us make when we lecture, that college students will be familiar with most of the words we use, as long as we avoid rarefied or academic terminology. Behind that assumption lies a pedagogical problem for which we have no good solution: inadvertently speaking over our students' heads.

What should we do about it? Dumbing down our speech to a sixth- or eighth-grade level is not an option. If we don't stimulate our students to learn important words, who will? On the other hand, even though we might take a few extra seconds after saying "chicanery" or "anomalous" to give a definition, we cannot do that with every "prig" and "pessimistic" that passes our lips.

One possible approach is to switch from essay-question to multiple-choice exams. The only reason I discovered the severity of my students' semantic problems is that, a few years ago, I made that switch in my lecture courses. The move was a painful one. It challenged my whole way of thinking about education. Multiple-choice tests in college? In a humanities course? When I was in college, I never had an "objective" test in history, English, or philosophy. That was how you tested students in junior high school or maybe high school, but certainly not in college.

Without going into all the reasons why I decided to use that kind of test, except in seminars, I can say that it gives me much more specific information about what my students understand and don't understand. Some of that information involves verbal ability. In 30 or 40 multiple-choice questions, there are easily a thousand words, some probably obscure to many students. Even the most straightforward questions may present challenges:

Lincoln's philosophy of life is best described as:

a. pessimistic

b. fatalistic

c. opportunistic

Most of my students probably don't know what "fatalistic" and "opportunistic" mean, even though they hear me use those words in class. Thanks to the few who are brave enough to ask me for definitions when the words come up in a multiple-choice test, I get more insight into the language gap between us.

If we aim to educate, we cannot simply ignore that gap. But neither can we devote all our time to it if we are hired to teach history, sociology, philosophy, or anything else that doesn't revolve around a distinct terminology that students must memorize.

Beyond the obvious practical suggestion — that we do what we can to expand our students' vocabularies — there is a deeper question: What do we take for granted when we teach? We should probably reassess, from time to time, that boundary line between the explicit and the implicit. Whether we are patient or impatient about the language gap, it can't hurt us to think about how our students interpret our basic words and gestures, the ones we assume to be self-evident.

What we should not do is fall back on the cherished clichés of the educator: indignation ("What an appalling decline in standards!") or resignation ("That's par for the course these days."). That would be pessimistic.

Andrew R. Heinze is a professor of history at the University of San Francisco. His most recent book is Jews and the American Soul (Princeton University Press, 2004).

Copyright © 2005 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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