Think Better

Unlock the world of language through roots and meanings, allowing ideas to flourish 

When I started teaching online, I believed my job was to explain grammar and assign vocabulary lists. I built neat charts of verb tenses. I prepared ashcards with denitions on the back. I told students to review ten words a day, and I believed them when they said they would. For a while, I thought the system worked. The lessons felt organized. The students nodded and took notes. Then came a moment I have never been able to forget. I was working with a woman in her mid-thirties, a project manager in Taipei. She had been studying English for eight years. She knew the word . She had written it on ashcards, lled it into worksheets, and recited it in quizzes. But when I asked her to describe how she would analyze a problem at work, she stopped. Her eyes went blank, and she looked past the camera as if the word had never existed at all. analyze That stare changed the way I teach. The word was in her memory, but it was not in her thinking. She could recognize it, but she could not reach for it when she needed it. I realized she had spent years collecting words the way someone collects stones: one by one, stored in a box, never touched again. The collection grew, but her ability to think in English did not.

From that day, I started asking a different question. Not but And I began to notice something I had missed for years. The students who thought most clearly were not the ones with the longest word lists. They were the ones who had learned to look inside words — to see their parts, their histories, their connections to other words. They had discovered that every word is a small living thing with roots of its own. How many words do you know? What can you do with the words you know?  This is the story of Thinking Better!