My Experience with Vocabulary

When I first saw the title of one of our chapters in Graves this week was Vocabulary, I was not looking forward to reading it. Vocabulary has always been a struggle for me in past years and even in the present. I am bad at memorizing things and my vocabulary is not very strong. I feel that I do not know some words that are common today. I am not sure why this has always been an issue for me, but I have just never enjoyed vocabulary.

I am not sure how this happened. I feel that I grew up in a vocabulary-rich environment and still live in one today. In elementary school, I think I was fine. My difficulties with this subject came in middle and high school. The different vocabulary words we learned every week seemed so insignificant to me and irrelevant to anything we were doing in class. Most of the words I had never heard before and could not even pronounce. The thing that made me hate vocabulary is that I never saw a point to it. I knew that I was not going to use these terms when writing a paper and especially will never use them in everyday language, and that proved to be true.

That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed reading the "Robust Vocabulary" article. I love how the teacher taught vocabulary to his students and feel that ideas similar to these could be used in any grade level. The concept that stood out to me the most was that the students were able to pick the words that they wanted to learn. I loved this! My favorite quote was, "In readers’ workshop, students choose the books they will read; in writers’ workshop, students choose their writing topics. It makes sense to me that students should also have choice about the words they want to learn." This stands out to me because this was the main issue I was having with learning vocabulary: relating the words to my life. This idea should be applied in all classrooms. Having students pick what the learn gives them so much more incentive to work hard and learn. If I were in his classroom, I would have put words into the "Word Box" on a daily basis. I read so much during elementary and middle school and had so many questions when reading. This box would have been so helpful to me in my learning experience.

This teacher's ideas, in my opinion, were truly great. Having so many difficulties with this subject, I feel that his approach would have been so beneficial to my learning and especially my feelings toward vocabulary. Instead of dreading vocabulary time, I might have actually looked forward to learning something that related to me.