Jason Turgeon writes: “The textbook evaluator blog by Mark Montgomery has become a must read for me, not so much because it’s relevant to my work as because it’s so well-written. Right now, the author is deconstructing, chapter-by-chapter, a book called Closing the Achievement Gap: A Vision for Changing Beliefs and Practices. His reviews are vicious, funny, and fit right in with the spirit of 37signals. He’s taking the authors to task for using unnecessarily big words simply for the sake of using big words. I’d love to see you write about this series of posts.”
Here’s an excerpt from the blog called Direct Vocabulary Instruction: An Idea Whose Time Has Come:
Anyway, all this discussion of convoluted defintions is starting to drive me crazy. The point that Marzano makes is this (drum roll, please): those kids who know more (who possess more “crystalized intelligence”, as he confusingly calls it) display higher academic achievement.
Let me state it again.
Students who know more are higher academic achievers.
Whoa. Blinding Flash of the Obvious.
So what does this have to do with direct vocabulary instruction? It means that we have to teach our kids new words. We have to provide direct instruction. We have to make them learn new words…
I “know” more words than a lot of people. Friends make fun of me when I use weird words like “limn” or “tintinabulation.”
And get this: I’m not smarter than my friends. I just know more words.
Why?
Because I studied them. I had teachers who instructed me–and taught me to love–the power of words.
Thus it irks me no end when people like Marzano have to invent new phrases and concepts. They end up obscuring the true power of words, even as they argue that our children should receive more vocabulary instruction. Even as I agreed with every word Marzano wrote, I became more and more irritated by his verbal obfuscation. Can’t academics use normal words–even if they are big ones? “Crystallized intelligence”? Please.
It’s all about knowledge. Plain. Simple. Easy to understand.
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clif
on 12 Feb 07“And get this: I’m not smarter than my friends. I just know more words.”
Actually I would argue he probably is smarter in some ways. The argument goes that intelligence is pretty much simply applied creativity. Creativity is simply knowing a lot about a lot of things and being able to interconnect it all.
Knowing a lot of words shows that there is an interconnect that helps distinguish why one word is more appropriate than another, and thus requires a lot of knowledge.
Knowing a lot of diverse things means that you will see the world differently than those that know a single subject. Crystallized intelligence is a word that says a lot about the true extent of knowledge and thus is a perfect word to describe what it is…you could call it something else, but you’d need to describe what it means and take an additional paragraph to say what a two word phrase could possible mean to someone in the field.
So yeah, learn a bigger vocab and you will be more intelligent. Just the same as learning a new skill and stepping outside your comfort zone will as well. What’s so hard about understanding this?
Aaron Blohowiak
on 12 Feb 07Also, the phrase (not a word) “crystallized intelligence” is established in the domain literature. It is used in opposition to “fluid intelligence”, which is an individual’s capacity to acquire new knowledge & problem solve.
Des Traynor
on 12 Feb 07Writing academic papers can be incredibly frustrating for this exact reason. If you say something short and simple it’s presumed that your work isn’t important. If you say the exact same thing using 800 words and a couple of unnecessary footnotes people assume that its high quality.
robb
on 12 Feb 07clif: Traditionally intelligence is thought of as an aptitude, in-built, not a result of learning.
He does use the work ‘smart’ which has different connotations, though—so it could be foggy. Smartness is something that is an evaluation of an aggregate of many aptitudes and skills, though… I have met more than my share of folks with limited schooling and vocabularies that are a lot smarter than me.
clif
on 12 Feb 07robb: Some people believe this…I don’t. I also work in the testing field and was oversimplifying it a bit. See the problems with writing towards an audience that doesn’t know the field—you need to be much more articulate with word usage to get the same terminology that once could otherwise (and I failed).
All in all, intelligence is known to have biological LIMITS but that doesn’t mean that mz twins provided with different circumstances and motivations can’t be light years apart in intelligence. If it were completely ‘in-built’, this will never happen.
Nathan Clark
on 12 Feb 07I suppose Turgeon’s big vocabulary doesn’t translate to a great spelling ability: tintinabulation should be tintinnabulation.
Josh
on 12 Feb 07So he apparently uses words like “limn” or “tintinnabulation” in conversation, and then takes this guy to task for “obscuring the true power of words” and pleads for academics to “use normal words” ...
Isn’t a bit of the pot calling the kettle black?
I mean, I generally agree. I preach brevity and accessibility in writing. But you can’t really tell people to use “normal words” after bragging about how many obscure words you know and use.
Paul McCann
on 13 Feb 07Speaking of which: if you’re going to celebrate the action described in the second sentence above then maybe “deconstructing” might be better left out of the first? Try “analysing”, or even “dismantling”, but “deconstructing” just reeks-of-wannabe.
Rao Kachibhotla
on 14 Feb 07While I agree with the basic premise to keep it simple, I do have a bone to pick. Somebody had to invent the word “knowledge” first before Matt came along and declared that it must be easy to understand.
This discussion is closed.