If the student in question uses the word not because it was in his usual vocabulary but because it appeared in the article about Magellan, the teacher has a valid point.
One of the points of being a student is to expand your vocabulary. You see a word used, you use it yourself. "Circumnavigation" is not a complicated concept. If you use it incorrectly, then the teacher should correct you. But don't tell a student to stay away from the big scary word.
but I hadn't an issue with teacher complaining that I'm not speaking in my own vocabulary when writing essays.
??? Words become your vocabulary by you using them, and that's all the more true when you're young and still developing your vocabulary.
There such a thing as "guessing the teachers" password. It's a failure condition.
It's a frequent exercise to read a text and rephrase it in your own words to show that you understood the text. It creates mental connections between the new information to which you are exposed and to what you already know. Essay writing is about "transfer" at least it was what I was taught in school.
New chapter!
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 102.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: