SAT Transition Words Can Be Confusing

It's like they speak a different language.

We all know that kids and adults sometimes don’t understand each other. I remember being in elementary school in the early 1980s and hearing students laughing at a substitute teacher for confessing to trying cigarettes when she was a teen. The poor woman had the audacity to utter this sentence (and I can still hear Heather from down the street retelling it, pausing every two words): “Oh yeah (looks around to see if any other adults can hear her). When I was young, I . . .  Puffed out . . . In the woods . . . With a ciggy.” Fifth graders and all their friends were giggling for weeks.

Shocking, right?

And every time you turn around, there’s another thing GenXers and Boomers aren’t supposed to say to a GenZer or a Millennial. I read the other day that “full stops” in punctuation offend GenZ to its collective core. If you want to make a GenZer mad (according to the clickbait article on Facebook, anyway), put a period at the end of your text. Ay, ay, ay. I teach SAT prep. I’m going to punctuate correctly no matter who gets mad. (I'm talking to YOU, Maya!)

But during my session with an eleventh grader last week, I learned something interesting about this generational difference. It has an impact on some students’ scores for sure, and even when working one-on-one with a student, a tutor might not realize what’s going on. We were discussing SAT Transition words, and “Cara” got one wrong. I asked her what “consequently” meant. She said, “I don’t really know for sure, but I know that it’s something bad.”

I do not think it means what you think it means, so study vocabulary.

Something bad? Seriously? We were discussing cause and effect, so I said, “You know. All actions have consequences, so if one action caused another, we can use consequently.”

She said, “Yeah. Like when you do something bad, you get a consequence.”

A memory of working in a housing program for teens and adults with developmental disabilities flashed by, and my shift partner’s voice boomed through my head: “Judy, quit being bold!” Judy didn’t talk, and I have no idea what she did to be so “bold,” but I heard that a lot in the few months I worked there.

Flash forward to picking my kids up at day care, and suddenly it came clear. This time it was Teacher Nancy’s voice, threats that weren’t all that threatening: “Put that down. If you don’t put that down, I’ll have to give you a consequence.”

Judge Judy is all about the consequences.

“Consequence” was (or still is) a euphemism for “punishment,” just as “bold” took the place of telling children (or non-speaking adults) they were “BAD.” Kids are smart. They know that “bold” is as bad as “bad,” but adults allowed themselves to believe that they weren’t damaging the children’s (or the non-speaking adult’s) self-esteem (even though “non-speaking” doesn’t mean “non-understanding).

Here’s a very real consequence of all these euphemisms: when a student sees the SAT transition word “consequently” on the test, they think it means something other than the actual definition, and if the sentence doesn’t require “something bad,” they’ll choose another (potentially wrong) answer. “Cara” is scoring in the high 1400s. She can’t afford to miss a question because adults twisted the meaning of a word in order to soften the punishment.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but what it means for me in tutoring sessions is that I’m collecting examples of vocabulary students might think they know, but they know the wrong meaning. If you can suggest some, leave a note in the comments.

Good luck on your test!