I assisted a girl named Madalaine with her English homework, which was to write sentences that included the vocabulary words that she learned. When Madalaine showed me the words she learned in her notebook, my eyes widened with surprise because the vocabulary words were pretty advanced. She explained to me that the words stemmed from the Latin root word “port”, which meant to carry. I asked her what grade she is in and she told me that she is in fifth grade. Now I understood why she was learning words such as spectator and portable because fifth grade is the last grade of elementary school. There was one word that Madalaine asked me to define. The word was opportunity. I told her that opportunity is something that is given to you and you should take it to grow as well as improve. I don’t think my definition seemed clear to her, so I asked her if the A+ Academy was an opportunity for her to improve her math and science skills. She stared at me blankly and said she did not know. We eventually moved on to another word that was simpler and easier to write a sentence for. However, the word opportunity stuck with me because I wondered how the Latin root word applied to the word opportunity. Finding the answer on Google, I learned that opportunity came from the phrase ob portum veniens “coming toward a port”, which meant wind blowing ships into the harbor or favorable wind that came blowing towards someone. This is an insightful meaning because an opportunity is something favorable that comes toward a person, and the person has the choice to either grab it or let it go.