A good frustration-fighting quote from my daughter's blog, www.humanimafoundation.org:

I think its important to remember that learning [...] doesn't take place when the "change" happens...Learning takes place when it seems like nothing is happening. As long as we're trying, we're getting it. It's only when we stop trying that "getting it" becomes impossible.

Mark Rashid

“As important as word recognition is, and it’s super important, vocabulary needs to be given as much emphasis. It is essential that children learn to quickly decode words, but if they don’t understand the meaning of the words, then their ability to understand the overall meaning of a story or other text will be compromised. And comprehension should always be the ultimate goal of reading.” says Diane Nielsen, associate professor of curriculum and teaching at University of Kansas, who published her study in the journal Reading Psychology.

Nielsen suggested that the findings are important because students can often appear to be good readers in the primary grades, but when text becomes more demanding they can quickly fall behind.

"I think it really helps if we can all get kids to be ‘word conscious’ – get them excited about learning new words, show them that words can be ‘cool’ and get them thinking about words in many different contexts.” says Nielsen.

In A World of 140-Character Tweets, Vocabulary Gains Importance... says article on recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) report.

While most students are no longer reading enough to build their verbal skills through this activity, vocabulary is still a core element of education.

Explicit vocabulary instruction can fill the gap!

LearnThatWord is a program that helps students review words and learn their meaning and spelling through deliberate practice. As such, we're on the opposite side of what society and the educational system fancies to be "best practice" right now.
The new student, we're told, should study "smarter, not harder."

Practice is shunned. Teachers are rightfully frustrated by old and mindless approaches to "practicing" vocabulary. This makes the new gospel sound so wonderful:
That vocabulary will stick by itself if it's put in brilliant, impressive context.
That it will enter their students' brains automatically if only they teach more root words and etymology.

There's nothing wrong with these approaches. Problem is that their value and weight is starkly distorted, by the factor of ideology.

There is a lot of money to be made by selling "magic bullets," and a lot of schools, overwhelmed by a system in crisis, like to believe that there's an easy solution that requires less effort, less time, less discipline.
It is obvious that your brain will pay more attention if content is presented in an interesting context and meaningful fashion.
Key to success and vocabulary (and spelling) automaticity is deliberate practice.
There are no short-cuts.

Programs like LearnThatWord make the process faster, more entertaining, less arduous, and easier to manage, but a learner still has to go through the study cycle to become masters.
That's neuroscience. Your brain is a pattern machine. It does not process information based on logic or analysis, but by rapidly processing stored patterns. If you haven't built the patterns, you can't succeed at the task. And there's no other way to building lasting patterns than deliberate practice.

Here some succinct excerpts of a new book by Ray Kurzweil, How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (affiliate link):

Compare, for example, how a human plays chess to how a typical computer chess program works. Deep Blue, the computer that defeated Garry Kasparov, the human world chess champion, in 1997 was capable of analyzing the logical implications of 200 million board positions (representing different move-countermove sequences) every second. (That can now be done, by the way, on a few personal computers.)

Kasparov was asked how many positions he could analyze each second, and he said it was less than one. How is it, then, that he was able to hold up to Deep Blue at all? The answer is the very strong ability humans have to recognize patterns. However, we need to train this facility, which is why not everyone can play master chess."