How to get kids excited about vocabulary

Where there is no feeling, there is no learning. Words must be felt: they must be experienced. Experience always trumps memorization. We don’t memorize tunes--we experience them. They linger in our minds because we experience them emotionally; in the same way, words must “come to life” for students. Each word carries its own emotional seed. Each word can be linked to something that conveys meaning beyond dictionary definitions. To get students to “enter into the word” is crucial. Even if their “experience” is participating in the process of discovering, or decoding, or creating the words, their chances of remembering and using the words are greatly improved.
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Someone passionate about words, someone in love with their meanings, subtleties, origins, and parts can make all the difference in a student’s encounter with words. When Steve Jobs would hold (or rather caress) an iPhone in his hand during its newest launch, even his detractors and competitors would feel the blush of his passion and a certain unstoppable impulse to find out what he was “so damned excited about.” This is true of students. Even the most lackadaisical student would become intrigued—if not energized—to find out what this teacher-person was so “excited about.” The subject can be anything from anatomy to zoology (even geology): it doesn’t matter! An excited teacher—someone passionately in love with his or her subject—can make a student interested even in something as arcane and soporific as the various striations in rocks. The challenge, then, is not for the student to learn, but for the teacher to create effective ways to engage the student so that he or she becomes an active, willing, and successful participant in the process of learning.