aka Ken Smith: Essential fluency

I don't remember any teacher ever mentioning the idea of fluency. I'm sure different fields describe it in different words, but I'm talking about writing or doing leatherwork or baking, whatever trade or craft you have in mind, and keeping your hand in, not letting yourself get rusty, practicing your chops, whatever you'd like to call it, pretty much every day, so that the machinery stays well-oiled, the joints don't ache, there is a flow of music or words or engraving or whatever it is, and you're able to see what you should see, move as you need to move, to practice the craft. If you practice every day, you build fluency, no matter what word you'd rather use instead of fluency.#

And I don't remember teachers talking about that. Maybe coaches did, not sure -- the coach of the high school team I was on sat at a desk in a dark part of the room, with an old-style desk lamp arced over his book, and during our practices he made his way through the Bible a page or two each day, from end to end during the school year, I recall. So we practiced, but he didn't talk about practice in terms like fluency. He didn't really talk about the sport much at all.#

But fluency and its synonyms are all around us, in every honorable field, and probably in some dishonorable ones as well. No matter what the field, we have to know how to build fluency. We should probably talk to young people about this essential life skill.#

Essential? I bet any foreign language teacher would say so. If you aren't fluent, you can't really claim to speak the language.#

Or maybe we should talk to young people about the difference between being a dabbler and someone who builds fluency in a field. Then we should ask them what field they'd like to explore right now, not years from now, after graduation, with fluency as a short-term goal. And help them do it.#