ABSTRACT
José was pointing out to me in his direct way the fallacy the middle school I taught at had fallen into. As teachers, we were relying heavily on our textbooks to tell us which words to teach, and in doing so, we were completely inundating our students with words to know. José simply gave up, realizing that there was no way he could learn all those words in one week. The ideal
number of words that students can handle cognitively is eight to ten a week for deep teaching (Scott, Jamieson-Noel, & Asselin, 2003); José had almost 80 words to learn!
