I pulled out a second sheet, and, at the top, wrote, “bad.” I filled the page with words like “atrocious, awful, dreadful, lousy, sad, unacceptable, imperfect, inferior, junky, abominable, amiss, defective, deficient, dissatisfactory, erroneous, fallacious, faulty. Of course, because my father had raised an over-achiever, I couldn’t stop with just one word. ” and so forth, until my page was filled. 2 pencil, I listed: “acceptable, excellent, exceptional, favorable, great, marvelous, positive, satisfactory, satisfying, superb, valuable, wonderful, ace, nice, pleasing. I thumbed through the pages until I found “good,” and indeed it had many synonyms. You should pick words that have a lot of synonyms. “Some words have more synonyms than others. Wouldn’t looking up the answers in a book be cheating?” I asked. “But I was supposed to come up with the words on my own. He said, “That’s easy.” He pulled a copy of Roget’s Thesaurus off a shelf and handed it to me.
That evening, I told my father what my assignment was. Then think of every other word that has the same or similar meaning, and write all those other words on the lines below.” “‘Throw up’ and ‘vomit,’” another giggled.Īfter many other examples were suggested, our teacher gave us a homework assignment: “I want each of you to think of one word, and write it on the top of your page. “Did you know that two different words can have the same meaning? Those are called ‘synonyms.’ Like ‘frozen’ and ‘icey’? Can you think of other words like that?” The teacher spoke to an engaged group of second graders, who were enjoying the lesson and raising their hands to join in the discussion.