Oh, lordy. That hurts on so many levels.
It's a bit silly to give words like
abstruse and
affidavit to a 7-year-old. Children that age won't use those words and will just forget them ("Joey, I can't go to recess today. I have to write an affidavit and the procedure I have to follow is abstruse.").
Plus, I'm an ornery type about things like this. It seems to me that unless the teacher quoted the source of these words, she was stealing or plagiarizing the vocabulary list. Here are vocabulary.com's terms of use, which are accessible via a link in the bottom right corner of every page on the site:
You can use word definitions from the word pages and excerpts from the articles from the Vocabulary.com Blog... in a classroom...so long as such usage would be considered "fair use" and the material is cited with the following attribution "Text from Vocabulary.com, Copyright ©1998-2013 Thinkmap, Inc. All rights reserved." The entire attribution should provide a link back to the page from which it was cited.
I would be inclined to bring this up with the principal if this list really did come from vocabulary.com. It may seem small, but I've dealt with two faculty members who do this sort of thing (as a supervisor), and what you catch in a situation like this can be the tip of the iceberg. It's not a good sign if someone can't even be bothered to make a simple attribution.
(But if this list didn't come from a website somewhere, ignore me.)
ETA: I found the list all over the web. It seems to be a list of SAT words that came originally from
vocabularycartoons.com. At least, they seem to have put the most work into the words. Someone named
Mr. Thompson appears to have also used it without attribution. This was precisely what our (eventually fired) faculty members were doing: using something and stripping it of information about who made it.
