Teaching Vocab

As all of you can understand, I became really bored with teaching vocabulary (after the third week). Even from the beginning, I wasn't sold on the idea of teaching it. Every Monday I had to introduce 10-12 new words to students and then quiz them on the words that Friday. And the quizzes were no joke. The students were asked to spell each word as I read it aloud, match the word to its definition, come up with some original sentences using the words correctly, fill in the blank with the appropriate vocabulary word, and even work with affixes as they were asked to learn prefixes and their meaning; a new word using a prefix from the unit would appear on the quiz and the students were asked to make an educated guess about the definition of the new word. And I have to admit, I ran into some words that I had to previously encountered; I found myself googling words the night before a vocab lesson to determine the appropriate pronunciation.

I had the freedom to experiment with the teaching of vocabulary in a variety of ways. I had the students do a lot of group work, create art work and other visuals about the words, act out the words, etc. etc. We pretty much tried something new each week. But I am still confused about the whole idea of teaching vocabulary and I don't know where I stand on the issue. In the world of English teachers, it is a controversial issue. Some don't believe in teaching it-- they think vocabulary is learned through reading and communication. Others believe that teaching students new words is increasing their lexicons; therefor, it is an asset to the teaching of the language. I guess I just don't buy into students being asked to memorize words that are not even in the dictionary, like "pseudo-Aesculapian". It is really important that high school students learn the definitions of words that I had never even heard of?

My cooperating teacher strongly believes in the teaching of vocabulary, and I am not sure if I agree or disagree with her. She knows the statistics and the cites the studies-- once a word is heard however many times, and it used however many times it becomes a part of the lexicon. If this is the case, and students are genuinely increasing their vocabulary-- it's a good thing-- right? During my weeks teaching vocab, I introduced the students to about 100 words. If they are retaining this information, and using the learned words in their college essays-- which they say they did-- it's not a bad thing, is it? I kind of have a feeling that the majority of the words are memorized for the quiz and immediately forgotten, and it makes me sad to think about the wasted class time.

What do you guys think about teaching vocab? Is it a waste or is it useful?