I’ve been in the test prep field for long enough now to be able to have seen about two complete high school student body turnovers. Amusingly enough, when I started prepping students for the SAT I was only a year or two out of college and still had a pretty decent sense of what was happening on the high school front.

Now, I don’t want to pull some sort of “in my day” spiel, but you should know that when I was in high school we didn’t have computers at the house and internet access was extremely limited (and, frankly, we really had no idea why we’d want to use it anyway). That being said, I’ll also admit that we watched a fair amount of television. Nevertheless, we spent a good deal of time reading recreationally. Anais Nin, On the Road, Jonathan Edwards–you name it and someone we knew was reading it. And now, well over a decade later, I will bet serious money on the following statement:

Kids–even the “smart” kids–just aren’t reading like they used to.

It’s a problem.

In the past week alone I’ve had to clarify the meaning of the following words for students hoping to attend Ivy League schools: timid, pedagogical, somber, polarized, consummate, equitable, and steadfast. [There are more but I'll spare you.] In no way do I mean to be condescending or to in any way poke fun at my students; instead I mean to Sound The Alarm.

In the world of educational chatter, “teaching to the test” and the limitations of what one can glean about a students’ intellect or college readiness from standardized testing are major issues–and a fair ones at that. However, I think we’re finally at the point where it’s not about the test anymore.

I don’t want to hear another word about how deeply unfair the SAT is until you can show me a culture of high school students who read quality literature for fun on a daily basis. Show me students who turn off YouTube and Hulu (and  Halo, for that matter) in favor of Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell or The Kite Runner. Show me students who are working through House of Leaves for the fun of it (to date, I’ve had one dare to do so and, frankly, he loved it…. and now he’s at Williams) and I’ll show you a legion of college applicants that aren’t doing battle with the reading comprehension section on the SAT.

As a tutor I spend more time than ever teaching the rudiments of critical thinking–meaning, I spend many hours explaining one, the meanings of words, and two, why it’s so important that we be able to articulate definitions. (It’s quite difficult to compare the meaning and intention of two words–the building blocks of answer choices–when all you can say about each of them is “oh, you know, I know what it means, but it’s just so hard to say it!”)

I’m seeing fewer and fewer students knock the SAT Reading out of the ballpark and I’m going to stick my neck out and say that I don’t think it’s because I’ve spontaneously become a lousy teacher. So, teachers, parents, and my tutor colleagues: please, please, encourage your students to read more than you ever have before. And students, you heard it here first: if you don’t start reading challenging literature on a regular basis and discipline yourself to learn and articulate the meanings of new words as you come across them, your SAT score will suffer.

It’s as simple as that.

Until now my general rule of thumb for practicing the reading passages on the SAT or ACT is “don’t read them aloud because you have to read silently during the test.” I’m all about practicality and doing things as they should be done, so I’ve always assumed this tactic made the most sense.

But sometimes I have to stop and rethink my strategies and this recent New York Times article has made me do a double take. One of the main tenets of my test prep tactics is based on a single concept: “I’m really good at standardized test; how can I share what I know with others?” Moreover, what are the experiences enhanced my natural test-taking ability and are they applicable to my students?

Reading this article, it hit me: reading aloud at my house wasn’t just something that my mother did with me when I was very young. We weren’t merely a bedtime story household. In fact, some of my favorite memories from my high school years involve hanging out with my mom, reading essays and articles to each other and laughing ourselves to tears.  We read Russell Baker, E.B. White, and George Will to each and talked about what we read. (Yes, seriously.)

The fact is that learning to read with nuance fosters not only an understanding of others’ work but also the ability to edit one’s own work efficiently and masterfully. Practicing communicating—conveying meaning—is integral to developing the very comprehension that the SAT in particular* tests.

What does this mean for us? Well for me and my students it means that we’re going to be doing a lot more reading aloud, and I’m going to be nitpicking their inflection and cadence to more carefully notice when they’ve lost their purpose. For students reading this it means it’s time to start reading out loud, whether to your friend or your family. If you find a funny article online on a magazine, share it with your friends by reading a paragraph or two to them rather than just handing them the magazine. When you’re hanging out on the beach this summer vacation share that funny bit you just read in your beach book.

Join the debate club. Get involved in theater. Consider being part of the literary magazine or yearbook at your school—most clubs that involve writing will involve reading aloud. Most importantly, get in the habit of reading material on a variety of subjects aloud into your daily life. Prioritize it, and you should see your scores increase.

*I say SAT in particular because the ACT’s reading passages are more geared toward testing attention to detail rather than nuance, intention, and implication of the passage itself. 

Yesterday morning one of my students couldn’t answer a sentence completion question during our SAT prep. The reason? It wasn’t that he didn’t know the meaning of the correct answer. He also had a pretty good self-created definition of the word he was looking for, so that wasn’t the problem. So why couldn’t he arrive at the right answer? He couldn’t read his options correctly; he didn’t recognize the word epitome. “What’s an eh pih tome?” he asked.

So what? So the dude can’t spell and he’s losing SAT points because of it!

Let’s talk about some moments when spelling matters on the SAT.

For starters, like epitome, some words in our language simply aren’t read easily with straightforward phonics. Sometimes you may fall prey to the sheer difficulty of a given word (e.g. colonel, hor d’oeuvres, eyrie) and sometimes you may find yourself in an SAT-induced panic that trips up your normally stellar reading that leads to mistakes on words like connoisseurs, leisure, or suede. Either way, if you know the material and don’t earn a point because you can’t spell you’re going to freak out when you get your score back.

Some homophones matter, too. Now, granted there aren’t a lot of really heavy duty English words that sound the same, but they’re out there.  For example: raise and raze. One means to build up or take to a higher level, the other means to flatten or demolish. Which is which? Look it up here.

Spelling also matters deeply when you don’t know the meaning of words you’ve come across. Granted, many words in our language aren’t built from roots, but many are. If you understand roots, understand connections between spellings of different words, then you can start to pick apart the meanings of words you’ve never seen before simply because of their spelling. You can get the general idea of the meanings of words like anthropomorphism, convivial, and antediluvian just from their components. However, if you don’t understand how those words are composed, how they’re built from little bits of meaningful pieces, well, you’re probably outta luck.

Finally, you may have noticed that when you’re putting an actual #2 pencil to paper there is no spell check, which can be a real handicap when you’re wanting to jazz up your essay with vocabulary you have so studiously applied to memory. (If you’re going to do those 5,000 flash cards, you may as well put the material to use.) If you take a stab at connoisseurs on the test and don’t realize you’ve spelled it conossores (or whatever), it may not matter much to you, but the grammar‘gician who’s reading your essay REALLY CARES. Don’t distract your reader with flagrant mistakes.

Ok, so what do we do? We learn to spell. How? Well, I, for one, have become very good friends with merriam-webster.com. I love their site! You get all the sub definitions of a word right there, which is great since I think you should read the secondary, tertiary, and quaternary definitions of a word and understand them. They also have a super pronunciation button that will read words to you in instances of confusion. I promise you that, even now, when I find words I don’t know in a book I take the time to look them up. You should too.

Take the English language seriously! Look at it, observe it; don’t just read it. Your writing for the rest of your life will thank you.

Extra Bonus Bit (some words that are tricky that you should commit to memory):

Epitome  haranguing  connoisseurs   hors d’oeuvres   eulogy  eulogize  chandelier   colonel   leisure   suede  concierge   cologne  eyrie   misled   raise   raze

If you’ve had your finger on the SAT/ACT phenomenon lately, you may have noticed that over the past 18 months or so the content of the ACT has become more varied and difficult, likely in response to the many students who chose to take it instead of the SAT. More kids with higher scores means the test has to get tougher.

So kids are switching back to the SAT, which is great, but it’s leading to a lot of conversations about vocabulary, which ultimately leads to conversations about reading. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the students who work with me directly are very privileged in their educational backgrounds: many of their parents hold several degrees and they attend excellent schools. One would be naïve to think that I’m not having conversations like “seriously, you need to start to reading” with presumed young scholars. However, blame You Tube, blame the television, blame our culture, or blame bad writers… I don’t know, but we’ve got kids who want to go to Brown and Penn who don’t read. I suppose this doesn’t strike them as unusual, as so few of their friends seem to read, but the fact is this:

The most prestigious colleges in the country (and frankly, many colleges that are not so prestigious) don’t give students big homework assignments and expect regurgitation; instead, they intend to challenge students’ thinking, to broaden their intellectual horizons, to encourage them to develop new ideas. If you’re mulling over new ideas, you’re going to need to write to express your thoughts, and you’ll need to do that well if you want anyone to take you seriously. Moreover, if you’re not a reader, your vocabulary will likely suffer as well, which means your SAT score is going to suffer.

All those coveted seats at Top Institutions? They’re going to readers.

Which means you need to go pick up a book or a copy of Vanity Fair, stat.

And if you’re not reading, whether you’ve realized this yet or not, you’re going to struggle to eek your way into the top institutions, no matter who you are. Hate to be heavy-handed, but these are the facts, kids. Now go pick up a book!