Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that the thing people forget most often is the thing they are trying to do at the moment. Right now, you either know that this is a true statement because your mind already is thinking of something else or you are waiting a few moments to see if it is true. But you probably do recall a time when you lost track of the exact thing you thought you were doing. This sounds like, “Now, what was I doing?” Nietzsche’s observation is true. In fact, by the time you finish reading this brief piece more than half of your fellow readers will find that their minds have wandered off to something else and whatever Nietzsche wrote will have been forgotten. How apt!

Let’s apply Nietzsche to good teaching. What teachers do every day requires unbelievable episodes of complete concentration. Episodes. Few of us are able to sustain the level of thinking, listening, responding, analysis of ideas, and generation of quality conclusions all of the time. We do not use our mental “A” game every minute of the day; we cannot. However, we are at our “A” game level of focus a great deal of the time and these are the episodes of concentration that count when we are teaching.

Children in the classroom also experience episodic highs and lows of their concentration. A child’s mind wanders just like an adult mind wanders. So, Nietzsche reminds us to focus long enough to complete the episode of teaching we want to achieve – just long enough. Because we know that minds will wander, we need to use our skills to bring the concentration of the children we teach to an attentive focus, conduct the instruction they need to learn, check and reinforce that instruction, and move into practice activities when minds will do what they will do – wander a bit. We also need to back up to provide quality initial instruction for those children whose minds were not with us the first time.

Now, let’s apply this to good learning. We need to engage children and keep them engaged for the time it takes to achieve our learning objective. Probably we should think of child engagement looking like an old-fashioned roller coaster of ups and downs. Consider the amount of mental interactions a child receives in an hour at school. A child has dozens of conversations with classmates. She has in-class instructional activities, hallway conversations, cafeteria talk food servers and table mates, and playground interactions with many more children and other adults. She needs to meet her needs for lunch and nutrition and the need for bathroom breaks. On the upside, a teacher and child are cognitively together and engaged with the teacher’s objective. On the downside, reality touches both a teacher and a child and each must take moments to breath, let their minds expand to the places only their mind will go before the teacher begins to orchestrate the next up cycle.

Nietzsche helps us to understand that believing a child must be “on task” all of the time is not only unlikely but impossible. So, don’t measure “on task” as a time, but consider it as many times.

We know that all people, teachers and children, are vulnerable to wandering thoughts. Knowing that what Nietzsche wrote accurately applies to our abilities to focus and maintain a focus helps us to craft our work and capitalize on episodes when mental attention is riding high. Knowing Nietzsche also helps us to understand and accept those moments when our mind wanders and more importantly to understand that a student’s mind also can and does wander.

“Käymälä.” Say what? “Käymälä.” I don’t know what this word means, and if a person speaking Finnish said it to me with deep anguish, I apologetically would not be able to help her. She might as well have said “sale de bains,” “ badezimmer,” “b no,” “ano,” “ 浴室 便所,”or “ουσ.” It’s all Greek to me. Actually, ουσ is Greek.

Knowing the word for bathroom is often a very important bit of knowledge. Not knowing the word may be even more important given the context. For interest, I have used words that mean bathroom to illustrate the value of a person’s vocabulary.

How many words do you know? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? You have never counted the words in your vocabulary? Welcome to the hoi polloi (majority of people). Generally, people don’t know how many words they know. We take our knowledge of words for granted. Then, when we encounter a word we don’t know, we usually fake it with a nod or we try to infer the word’s meaning from the rest of the sentence or conversation. In most social conversations, this works. However, what if your knowledge of what a word’s definition would determine the status of your home mortgage, or the success or failure of a business decision, or left a family hungry when all they wanted to know was the location of a nearby grocery. Most often we are not engaged in life or death decisions based upon our words; but we could be in a dire emergency.

Research studies have estimated the number of words a person should know by a given age. This is a sampling of that research.

(Receptive words are words that are commonly used and have a usual and apparent definition. I am hungry. The word hungry would be understood by most listeners. I am famished. The word famished gives more meaning to my hunger; it makes me more than hungry but not yet starved.)

Vocabulary is power. If you have a strong vocabulary with receptive and expressive words, you have the advantage. You understand more of what you read and are told. You can communicate with others in words that you choose to make them know what you want them to know or feel what you want them to feel.

As an educator, the vocabulary of my students directly determined the material I could provide to them to read or hear. Students with large personal vocabularies were days and weeks ahead of classmates. Those with inadequate vocabularies required instruction of needed words before they could understand what they read or heard and then use that information to expand their subject area knowledge. Children with small working vocabularies have significant disadvantages for future academic learning; these children are academically disabled.

Exposure to words is essential. Words that are spoken. Words that are written. Words that are shown in pictures. Children must be exposed to words beginning at a young age and then have an increasing exposure through their school years in order for them to build an adequate vocabulary for academic learning.

Parents – spend time every day talking with your children using appropriate adult language. Keep appropriate adult reading material in places where your children can read it. Pick a word of the week and build word families from that word. Fifty-two word families per year while a child is in school will build 676 word families and that expands into thousands of word!

Robert Marzano and Debra Pickering’s Building Academic Vocabulary develops a solid understanding of the relationship between a child’s developing academic vocabulary and subsequent learning in school. The Oklahoma State Department of Education created a link to their web site based upon this work. The vocabulary lists displayed for each grade K – 8 and specific high school courses of study demonstrate the expanding rigor of school-based vocabulary.

Educators and parents should examine these vocabulary lists and consider the depth of their students’ or child’s academic vocabulary. Students who know these words and terms and have an expressive knowledge of how to use them will be the most competitive in their academic work.

http://ok.gov/sde/building-academic-vocabulary#Vocab

We know that creating a perceived need for action often is needed before an educator or parent can be moved to action. So, here is a way for you to assess your students’ or your child’s or your own vocabulary. How many words do you know? The following web site provides a quiz to approximate the breadth of your vocabulary.

http://dynamo.dictionary.com/

Contemporary federal and state mandates direct local school districts to improve every child’s academic achievement. Vocabulary development and improvement is a good beginning that pays dividends over the years.

Just as in real estate where success is founded on Location! Location! Location, success in school and life can be founded in Vocabulary! Vocabulary! Vocabulary!

I recently read all of the posts on the Harvard Educational Review’s “Voice in Education Blog,” sat for a quiet hour and pondered. What would Curly say about this?

Curly? You remember the Jack Palance character in “City Slickers” who gave his cowboy’s advice to Billy Crystal regarding the secret of life. That was Curly. Billy and his fellow urbanites tried to use a dude ranch experience to “…take the knots out of their ropes.” Alone with Billy on the cattle drive, Curly held up one gloved-finger and said that this one finger is “the secret to life.” Billy, of course, asked what that one finger represented and Curly elucidated, “That’s what you have to figure out and when you do nothing else will…” ever make a difference.

Just in case you have forgotten Curly’s secret of life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2k1uOqRb0HU

A reference to Curly may cause a professional reader to stop at this point. But that would be a mistake; as much of a mistake as thinking that public education can continue to listen to its many-headed and oppositionally-opinioned commentators and from their well-intended and well-educated words find its educational secrets for a successful future. Or, that public education can find its future without establishing its “secret of life.”

It is not my purpose to propose the text of that secret, though I already know what my one finger represents. It is for states and school districts collectively to do this essential and future-altering work. Until meaning of this “one finger” approach is completed, we will remain not cattle but cats running before the city slickers. For when a local school district’s charge is to implement all of the current federal and state mandates plus all of the legislated statutes that remain “blue” in each state’s department of public education and move this broad implementation to the new fiats of accountability, it is tempting to join Curly on his next cattle drive and hum along to Ghost Riders in the Sky. In the ill-defined work today’s educational leadership, we are as inept and disoriented and ill-equipped for the successful leadership of public education as Billy Crystal was to become a cowboy.

If you have done the Curly work and know the secret to your educational work and leadership, hold up your finger when you read the next blog and attend your next workshop or listen to the next exhorting politician cum educational critic or taxpayer group wanting more for less. If their words do not comport with your #1, ride on and leave those words where they belong in the dust behind you as you carry on in the direction of your pointed finger.