Word Nerd: Dispatches From the Games, Grammar, and Geek Underground

by John D. Williams Jr

  A wonderful example of the collaborative aspect of cooperative learning emerged from a middle school in Pennsylvania during our early testing phases before the program launch. It featured a twelve-year-old boy who had been deemed a “distraction” to other students because of erratic behavior. As a result, he was routinely marginalized from the general student population. He spent his days in an empty classroom with a tutor who also served as a monitor.

  However, his School SCRABBLE Program teacher had the idea to have him participate in a session. After he was paired with a compatible partner, the experiment began. It could not have turned out any better. The boy immediately took to SCRABBLE and was thoroughly engaged. Better yet, he was a calm, focused partner. Encouraged by the initial progress, the teachers continued the experiment. His behavior continued to improve. Ultimately, they decided to take things further. The boy was introduced into an art class, where he was given a partner on a simple project. It worked! He was comfortable, engaged, productive, and increasingly social. I’m not saying he went on to be the valedictorian or president of the student body—I have no idea—but these were critical baby steps. And no path to wholeness or self-improvement starts without them.

  Before the national launch of the program, our NSA-Hasbro team took our idea on the road to various schools for nearly two years to see what we could learn. Geographically, we chose three regions: the Springfield, Massachusetts area, Long Island, and Manhattan. Hasbro Games was located in East Longmeadow, a few miles away from Springfield. In many ways, it could be Anywhere, USA, which was exactly what we wanted. Long Island, where the NSA was headquartered, served as the testing ground for suburban and rural schools, and Manhattan would provide the urban experience. To be thorough, we agreed we had to visit classrooms from grades 1–12 in both public and private schools.

  We had decided we needed three trips to every school. The initial trip was to introduce ourselves and the fundamentals of the game. The second was to give some advanced tips and begin competition. The third was to have an informal class championship. Bear in mind we were teaching the teacher as well.

  It was clear on the first visit to grades 1–3 that they were not the ideal participants. Though sweet and cute, the kids were predictably distracted and fidgety. Despite being up for the new experience, they soon became bored. Also, their vocabularies and maturity were simply too undeveloped for them to find plays easily and quickly. I should add there were numerous incidents of flying tiles, missing letters, and dropped SCRABBLE boards.

  We learned two key things going forward. Generally, kids under ten years old were simply too young. And for School SCRABBLE, we should replace the standard SCRABBLE board with the deluxe model, where the tiles are secured in grids.

  Numerous trips to middle schools confirmed our thoughts that ages ten to thirteen would be the best participants in School SCRABBLE. That has been the traditional age range for the National Spelling Bee and many school chess programs. Also, kids that age are reasonably socialized but not too jaded.

  One of our first field trips was to a middle school in Springfield. The kids took to the game almost immediately—well over half of them saying they’d played it at home. There were a lot of high fives, word challenges, and light trash talk. The teacher could not believe how engaged her students were. She uttered the phrase I’d hear numerous times in ensuing years: “They’re learning and they don’t even know it!” Exactly. She later wrote us and said she was using SCRABBLE as an incentive. “I told them if they finished the lesson plan early, they could play SCRABBLE. I never saw them so motivated.”

  Trips to other middle schools yielded identical results, regardless of the location or composition of the class. Inspired by the experience, we developed materials geared specifically for the kids. “Cool Words to Know” was the two- and three-letter words, Q-without-U words, common JQXZ words, and more. Another piece, understandably popular, was “How to Beat Your Parents at SCRABBLE.”

  We developed materials for teachers as well. Our NSA School SCRABBLE Program director, Yvonne Lieblein, worked with NSA players Ben Greenwood and Christine Economos, who were teachers and educational consultants, to this end. First, they created key vocabulary exercises using the SCRABBLE board and tiles. Then they created lesson plans based directly on state and nationally mandated vocabulary guidelines, as well as a series of SCRABBLE-based activity books to be sold at retail.

  Another key contributor was Dr. Paul Folkemer of the Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey. Dr. Folkemer was a past National Middle School Principal of the Year and a true SCRABBLE fanatic. In fact, he’d created a daily SCRABBLE challenge that was telecast on his school’s classroom network. The daily feature was picked up by a local cable access channel, and soon the whole town was playing along with the kids!

  On an early visit to Benjamin Franklin Middle School, it had been arranged for me to play five games at once against five teams of two students each. At least one of those teams beat me as I scurried back and forth trying to make my best plays. In one key game, I was about to lose when I saw the seven-letter play POOPERS on my rack.

  I was so focused that my only thought was “party poopers.” Swear to God. So I laid the tiles down against my opponents, a pair of eleven-year-old boys. You can imagine their reaction to seeing the word POOPERS—and then the reaction of the boys next to them, then the rest of the class, then the dismayed teacher. Muffled by giggles and hoots of laughter, I tried in vain to explain the word, but the damage had been done. Only later did I learn that the word POOPERS was not a legal word in SCRABBLE, regardless of its meaning.

  Our research visits to high schools proved less fruitful. In fact, we cut these short because it was apparent early on that SCRABBLE in the classroom or as an extracurricular activity just wasn’t optimal for this demographic. The reasons were numerous. High school students are already overbooked, and even the most enticing SCRABBLE scenarios were no match for raging hormones. Almost every game we tried at the high school level became an opportunity for flirting, teasing, and goofing around. I remember vainly trying to explain the joy of playing an obscure word to a noisy, distracted group of Long Island teenagers. As I trudged back from the front of the classroom to join my colleagues, a sullen fifteen-year-old boy glared at me. “Dork,” he muttered.

  ■ ■ ■

  When our field work was completed in 1992, it was time to both announce and launch the National School SCRABBLE Program. It was clear that we had two key needs: a partner to help us get into schools, and materials.

  For the partner, we chose Scholastic, the venerable and highly respected educational publisher, which had a division specifically charged with this kind of mission—to help companies responsibly and realistically introduce viable new products to schools. Scholastic had the experience, credibility, and database we needed. As a team, we all began work on a direct-mail piece introducing School SCRABBLE and its educational benefits. As we’d done so often before, the NSA recommended that the Hasbro name be minimized in the endeavor; make it about the game.

  For the second element, the NSA created a School SCRABBLE Kit. The idea was to have everything necessary for a classroom of twenty-four students contained in one box. We recommended the following materials be included: six SCRABBLE games with the raised grid surface, racks, tiles, an Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary, the “Cool Words to Know” word list to be photocopied, a curriculum guide for the teacher, and a five-minute video showing a classroom full of cool middle school kids having the time of their lives playing SCRABBLE.

  I’ll skip over the year-by-year growth of the program and simply say that it was a huge success by any standard. After a successful launch, we went on to sell more than thirty thousand kits in the next decade with over a million students participating.

  We learned so much. One of the significant findings was that, at the end of the day, any endeavor is only as good as its local operatives. This holds true whether it’s a Scout troop, 4-H c
lub, chess club, or gymnastics club. We came to appreciate how much pressure is on teachers from so many sources: parents, the administration, the state educational offices, and the students themselves. We also learned that many teachers bought School SCRABBLE Kits with their own money or from a small classroom budget rather than send the request through a labyrinth of financial approvals.

  This launch also gave me a personal reality check in regard to dealing with a couple of large organizations. The National PTA, which I assumed would be a natural partner, was a complete dead end. A trip to their annual convention indicated to me that they were more about fund-raising than about curriculum. This led us to create a brochure on how to use SCRABBLE as a fund-raiser; one of the chief ways was to have people pledge money for points scored during a tournament. While the PTA never embraced this, we did have more luck with the Literacy Volunteers of America and its successor, ProLiteracy Worldwide. These groups stage up to seventy-five SCRABBLE-themed fund-raisers a year throughout North America and by late 2013 had raised nearly $2 million doing this.

  My most disappointing institutional encounter was with the Department of Education (DOE) in Washington. I had called the office of my congressman in the House of Representatives. They gave me a contact name at the DOE, whom I called six times without a return phone call. On the first call, I simply left my name and a fifteen-word message. On the third phone call, I left a longer message. I emphasized that we were not looking for funding, an endorsement, or even a meeting. All we wanted was to know if in their myriad platforms for communicating with the nation’s schools, there might be a place to mention this innovative new teaching idea. On the sixth call, I left a brief message: that I was no longer interested in the DOE’s help, but was curious as to the magic number of phone calls needed before someone called me back. That went unanswered as well.

  Another huge School SCRABBLE disappointment was my dealings with Electronic Arts (EA), who held the license from Hasbro for the SCRABBLE Internet and Digital rights in North America. The NSA worked with them when they first acquired the rights, consulting on marketing and development of the online game. The executives I dealt with were fun, delightful people, but I concluded they were mostly interested in having “Endorsed by the National SCRABBLE Association” on their products.

  Early on, I had urged both Hasbro and EA to take ownership of kids’ SCRABBLE play on the Internet. In 2004, we suggested a plan to form online School SCRABBLE Clubs with proctored interclub play and individual play between members. I felt this was critical to the health—hell, survival—of the brand for the future. Imagine a middle school in Florida challenging a middle school in Illinois to a match!

  EA agreed this was a great idea and authorized me to go on national television to announce it. So during an ESPN telecast of the National School SCRABBLE Championship—more on that later—I appeared, gushing about the development of this idea. Embarrassingly, it never happened. Unfortunately, as I write this, there is still no designated place for kids to play SCRABBLE with other kids or schools on the Internet. Most serious School SCRABBLE players have found their way either to Words with Friends or to an illegal site run out of Romania.

  From the very beginning of School SCRABBLE, we had talked about eventually having a National School SCRABBLE Championship (NSSC). This was inspired by the National Spelling Bee as well as our own National SCRABBLE Championship for adults. Competitions of this kind were beginning to flourish. In addition to the spelling bee, there were national vocabulary, geography, and math “bees” as well. Of course, the leader in all this was chess. School chess programs and competition have been thriving forever. This is pretty astonishing, given chess’s learning curve and intellectually intimidating reputation.

  Despite the lack of an official Internet school and kids’ platform to help drive our efforts, the School SCRABBLE Program continued to grow—especially in terms of competition. So as we contemplated our first national event, we began with a couple of tournaments in Massachusetts, then a New England–wide tournament in Boston in 2001.

  We learned a lot along the way. For openers, less is more. So rather than go with the adult tournament time limit of twenty-five total minutes, we kept the kids at twenty-two minutes per team. We also learned that kids bring a lot of playground behavior indoors for this sort of thing. There was a lot of teasing and trash-talking—to the point we had to establish a Sportsmanship Award to deter this.

  Of course, there was a wide range of types of kids, skill levels, and hijinks. At one tournament, we had a pair of seventh-grade girls who realized their fifth-grade boy opponents were complete novices. Midway into the game, they decided to start laying random, absurd combinations of letters on the board. Their plays might have included nonwords such as GRUNK, MARP, and BANBAY. The boys were too intimidated to challenge and deferred on every play, so the girls won by hundreds of points. Needless to say, this particular girls’ team did not win the Sportsmanship Award. In fact, because of this, we changed the rules to put a ceiling on the margin of victory a team could achieve.

  One classic tournament sight was a game between two eighth-grade girls and, again, a pair of fifth-grade boys. This time, the boys were from an all-male Catholic school. They sat stick straight, side by side, in starched white shirts, school ties, and blazers with the school crest.

  The girls were another story. We all know the differences in physical maturity between a thirteen-year-old girl and a ten-year-old boy. So suffice it to say these two girls were light-years ahead of these two boys in the puberty sweepstakes. And their fashion sense had a touch more flair than that found at a typical Catholic school. Inspired by, perhaps, Britney Spears, each girl was fully made up, bejeweled, and confident.

  Each time I walked by their table, the boys were doing one of two things. They either stared straight ahead, silently watching as the girls frolicked across from them, or they kept their heads down, eyes averted, as these apprentice sirens cast their spell over the board. I never did find out who won that game.

  Another thing we learned was that every year the level of play became better and better. Sure, there were always newbies in the back of the room—and we embraced them—but the kids at the leading tables were becoming as good as some adult tournament players. There were numerous reasons for that. Sometimes parents, recognizing a new interest, brought the kids to a local adult SCRABBLE club for competition and pointers. Books such as Word Freak and Everything SCRABBLE® told about the joy of the game and offered tips and exercises. And there were now schools that’d been using School SCRABBLE for a number of years, so the second and third round of students were more advanced.

  We went on to have our first National School SCRABBLE Championship in Boston in 2003, spearheaded locally by SCRABBLE promoter Sherrie Saint John and her husband, Gregg Foster. From there, we held them in Providence, Orlando, and Washington, DC. Although the event was still held on the East Coast, we were starting to go national for competitors. From the early New England–only players, we now had kids from California, Texas, Indiana, North Carolina, Utah, Oregon, Canada, and more. Hasbro continued to support the NSA with a beautiful hotel site, thousand of dollars in prize money, an opening reception, breakfast and lunch, trophies, and welcome packages with games, T-shirts, and other goodies for students and coaches. Our friends at Merriam-Webster donated free SCRABBLE dictionaries and created an annual word-based contest with a substantial prize such as an iPad.

  Below is an example of the contest for the kids for the 2012 NSSC. Let’s see how well you can do against the young word wizards who entered.

  Use Your Merriam-Webster

  Official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary, Fourth Edition

  to Score High

  Spell it out for a chance to win a Kindle Touch 3G e-reader from Merriam-Webster!

  A blue color (adjective) 10 points _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  To gossip (verb) 24 points _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  Standard keyboard (noun) 21 points _ _ _ _ _ _

  Ext
remely idealistic (adjective) 26 points _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  To seize a vehicle while in transit (verb) 22 points _ _ _ _ _ _

  A cell formed by the union of two gametes (noun) 19 points _ _ _ _ _ _

  To cover with a thin varnish (verb) 12 points _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  The science that deals with animals (noun) 20 points _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  A question (noun) 19 points _ _ _ _ _ _ _

  A marketplace (noun) 17 points _ _ _ _ _ _

  Answers on page 203.

  Although the events were fully funded, it’s important to note that every team paid its own way to the National School SCRABBLE Championship. The typical contingent from a school would be two kids, a coach, two parents, and a handful of siblings, so there was a fair amount of money involved. Sometimes teams were underwritten by a PTA or school activities budget. Often the school would hold bake sales or a car wash to raise the necessary funds.

  It was inspirational to see schools, classmates, and the community getting behind this mission. In many areas, the NSSC competitors were considered as important as any athletic team headed off to a big tournament. One of the coolest scenarios was when a winning school returned home to a rally in which the National School SCRABBLE Championship silver cup was placed in the school’s trophy case along with those of the football, baseball, and gymnastic teams!

  This played to our core message to the kids: that you could get recognition, travel, win money, and take part in serious competition even if you could not run fast, jump high, or throw a ball with accuracy. Hey, if I can convince one kid that Smart Is Cool, I will have justified my time on earth.