I have always loved words. I was the kind of kid who walked home from school with my nose buried in a book and who read under the covers with a flashlight. In school, DEAR (Drop Everything and Read) was the best part of my day, tied with when we got to diagram sentences. At home, my twin sister, who studied Latin, taught me about word origins and how, by knowing where words came from, we could  decipher their meanings. I still remember her blowing my mind by telling me a peninsula is called that because pen means almost, so a peninsula is almost an island. When I went on to get a degree in Spanish Language and Literature from Binghamton, in one of my first poetry classes the professor taught us the word penúltimo. I knew it must mean almost last —and it does—or, more specifically,  second to last, in literary terms.

After school, I started working at Martha Stewart Living magazine. One of my proudest moments as an editorial assistant was catching a typo just before a story went to print. Another proud moment was being assigned to write Knitting 101. As an assistant editor, I went on to write other hard-hitting articles like Waxed Flowers, Pinecones 101, and—my favorite—our Good Things Column. I loved coming up with fun intros and outros and finessing the instructions in between until they were super clear. I couldn’t believe what a fun job I had and it only got better.

When an opportunity arose to move to the television department or to our catalogue division, I agonized about what to do. Writing catalog and product manual copy would be so much fun. My then-boyfriend suggested I rethink my idea of fun, and I wound up choosing television. It was a smart move. I still wrote my beloved how-tos but only now as part of scripts. I got to learn about and do all sorts of things: I crafted with Big Bird, rode an Icelandic horse in the studio with the First Lady of Iceland and spent an afternoon with Maurice Sendak. Many times I went on camera to do segments with Martha.

Since Martha is a kindred spirit when it comes to words, she indulged my silly segment ideas like walking around the office giving coworkers a pop quiz on the meanings of tulle, tuile, tool, tole, toil, and toll. We booked lots of wordsmiths like Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword puzzle editor, and Simon Winchester who wrote the Professor and the Madman about a man committed to a mental hospital who contributed over 10,000 words to the Oxford English Dictionary.  And, when I produced James Lipton from Inside the Actors Studio, though he was there to promote his autobiography, I finagled another audience giveaway: his first book, An Exaltation of Larks, on collective nouns, real and imagined.  He told me a group of producers is a panic and he signed my copy of the book, “For Lenore, who didn’t panic.”

The thing is, when you are prepared, you don’t panic, because you are confident. My goal for my students is to be so well prepared that the test feels almost like a game. I show them them the SAT’s and ACT’s tricks and traps, but I also teach them writing and reading skills that will serve them their entire academic careers and beyond. I love when kids realize how skills that were once difficult are actually totally doable—and even fun!