You have to be a genius of creativity and spend hours of prep to produce a classroom experience for your students that will help them overcome the tedium of standardized testing and core curriculum requirements. Sherry And throw some punctuation in there as well. Jon In all fairness to the DOE, they are talking about forbidding the words in standardized tests, not general usage. The real irony here is the thinking that we would need this particular list. I mean, c'mon, who would use most of them to start with? 1. John smokes three packs of cigarettes a day. There are 20 cigarettes in each pack. How many cigarettes does John smoke a day? 2. John has 4 siblings, a brother and two sisters. All three sisters have died of lung cancer from second hand smoke. How many siblings does John have left? (Extra credit: Name them.) John and his brother Carl have caught three rats and 212 roaches in their apartment. How many vermin have they caught altogether? (Extra credit: Name them) Seriously, how many of us have seen any of those words in a test situation? Selse, Sweden "2. John has 4 siblings, a brother and two sisters. All three sisters have died of lung cancer from second hand smoke. How many siblings does John have left? (Extra credit: Name them.)" That's a hard one... Frah Rawex is gay Frah Die in Fire HesitantFutureTeacher Do you ever feel like the only person on Earth who has read books