In some ways, I think my fourth grade spelling tests may have been the peak of my educational career.

The spelling test system in Mrs. Brown’s class at Defer Elementary School was somewhat complex: everyone took a spelling pre-test at the beginning of the week. The words you got wrong were on your spelling list for the week, and you would be quizzed on them that Friday. The words you spelled correctly on the pre-test were not on your list – instead, you replaced them with words of your choosing and took your own customized test at the end of the week.

I excelled in spelling as a fourth grader. I knocked every pre-test out of the park, consistently achieving the highest scores in the class. I delighted in the pristine lack of red marks on my pre-tests as they were handed back to me, along with the privilege of pulling out a dictionary, extracting from it the longest, most difficult words, and placing them on my spelling list.

Fastidious. Frondescence. Holocrystalline. Hypochondriac. Phosphorylation. Rheumatism. Rhododendron. I hunted through my heavy, blue dictionary at home for silent letters and trick spellings, for long strings of characters which I could meticulously copy down in the perfect order when it came time for the test. I delighted in the lengthy intricacy of my hand-chosen words, and week after week, I combed through that dictionary, in painstaking pursuit of a challenge.

Somewhere in the eight years between now and fourth grade, my attitude towards spelling and school in general completely reversed. To put it simply, I stopped looking for challenges.

Somewhere along the educational ladder, I developed the habit of slacking.

Slacking, I believe, is simply the loss of that hunger for a challenge. It doesn’t always manifest itself in uncompleted homework or failing grades or low test scores. Slacking is my natural tendency to find the easiest way out and take it, my propensity to do the minimum amount of work which will still allow me to skate by with an A. It’s skipping the story problems on my math homework because they take too long to read. It’s skimming through the book to find the answers rather than actually reading. It’s tuning out teachers’ examples because they won’t be on the test. It’s anything and everything that prioritizes my desire not to work over my desire to learn. To excel. To take on and conquer a challenge.

I’m not sure exactly when I stopped looking for challenges in school, or when I began actively avoiding them. All I know is that when I reveled in the pure joy of those long, difficult words as a fourth-grader, I was a better learner. Sure, I may know more facts, more concepts, more equations by now. I may have a larger vocabulary. On paper, I’m probably more intelligent than I was in fourth grade. And yet, when I look back on those fourth grade spelling lists, a part of me wishes I could still be the curious, passionate speller I was then. At a distance of eight years, I don’t envy the long hours that girl spent staring at the tiny print of that cumbersome, blue dictionary, but I do envy her inquisitiveness. Her excitement. Her still-intact sense of wonder at the world of unlearned knowledge all around her.

Perhaps it’s not too late to revive my former love for challenges. I hope that somewhere within me, that fourth-grader is still alive, still capable of questioning, still hungry for knowledge and learning and excellence. I hope that now, in the midst of my senior year, I can pull her out of hiding and convince her once again to seek the silent letters, the trick spellings, and the pure joy of a good challenge.