Principle vs. Practice

Below is a blog post I typed up for my fellowship at Heritage. We're required to post on a communal blog once every two weeks or so to keep the coordinators of the fellowship abreast of what we're doing.

"I keep reading that effective methods of teaching vocabulary involve more than just requiring students to memorize definitions. Apparently, even writing the words in sentences isn't even enough. Students should see the word in multiple contexts. They should experiment with derivatives of the word. They should learn about roots and affixes and connect words' structures and meanings to those of other words they've studied. All of this, of course, takes time and lots of careful, explicit instruction. However, from what I've been reading, depth of knowledge is much more important than breadth, making the effort to teach it right effort well spent. Students learn about words when they're instructed in this way (instead of simply learning words), and they gain skills to help them continue to acquire vocabulary in other settings.

"I saw firsthand how important it is to provide students with context and thorough definitions at Heritage. Ms. P. gives the students lists of eight words every week or so. The definitions they learn are purposely brief to make them easy to remember, but often they don’t manage to convey the complexity of a word's meaning. Ms. P. gives the students one or two examples when introducing the word, and then the students complete a vocabulary packet. On this particular day, one of the words was "pretentious." Ms. P. told the students that it meant "fake," and explained that people like Paris Hilton were pretentious, and so were people who had lots of plastic surgery and wore large, flashy jewelry. 'Hey!' yelled a girl from the back row, 'Michael Jackson got a pretention nose!' Sigh."