That’s not very fair–nobody here is advocating mindlessness, @xiggi. I definitely am anti-mindlessness.
Again, nobody’s saying vocab is “all” it takes. In fact, I’ve explicitly said vocab is not all it takes.
Actually, I find students can memorize 2400 words in about three weeks without negatively impacting their ability to learn and apply reading and analysis methods at all. In fact, they can also learn SAT grammar and how to write the essay at the same time.
It’s not very hard to learn “THOUSANDS” of words. The reality is that historically, the ETS draws from about 6-8000 words. 2-4000 of them are relatively ordinary words (“escape,” “exit,” “bully”), leaving something like 3000-4000 that are not commonly known by teens who haven’t read voraciously. I see time and time again that memorizing 3000 during a single school vacation is very manageable and doesn’t at all have to come at the expense of learning other methods.