DR. ALENE H. HARRIS taught secondary language arts (middle school and high school) and life science in Nashville, TN, for 16 years, including suburban, inner city, and private school classrooms.

In her first year of classroom teaching she quickly realized that memorizing long words and longer definitions resulted in little lasting learning for students, and so began developing a vocabulary program based on Greek morphemes (roots, prefixes, suffixes) most common in the English language – information she had kept from class notes in a semester’s course on etymology. She gave students a choice: “You can memorize big words with big definitions or learn small word parts with small meanings and use that knowledge to unlock big words.” Students chose the latter, and for 16 years over 1,000 students -- reading both above and below grade level –worked through the twelve lessons and mastered the 200+ morphemes. After developing the Greek Morphemes program (It’s NOT Greek to Me!), she set about developing a companion curriculum based on common Latin Morphemes (Latin and Loving It!), recognizing that if students had both the Greek and the Latin, their science vocabulary would grow exponentially. She found her students mastered vocabulary best when they worked through the Greek lessons one year and followed up with the Latin lessons the next.

Her interest in and concerns about teacher education led her to pursue a Ph.D. in Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, where as a faculty member for the past 20 years she has engaged in educational research and taught future secondary teachers at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education. Her work has included research and dissemination in areas of classroom management and creating conditions for learning, with a focus on how teachers begin the year. In 2003, as the author of the preservice/inservice program Getting Off to a Good Start, she founded the consulting company Ready to Teach, and has since added workshops (1) for secondary science teachers on effectively managing science lab classes, (2) for secondary English teachers in teaching Greek- and Latin-based English vocabulary skills, and (3) for college-level instructors in applying principles of effective teaching and learning.

In recent years she has shared the vocabulary programs not only with future English teachers in her English methods courses, but also with teachers in a variety of educational venues -- public schools, charter schools, private schools, and home schooling parents.

She welcomes feedback from parents and classroom teachers and students about their experience with using the Ready-to-Teach vocabulary programs.