Q. I try to not introduce any new words and go out of bounds but I am not very good at it. Too many words seem to creep into the discussion. What can I do?
A. There is kind of a self-regulating mechanism in non-targeted instruction and so really we don’t need to worry so much about staying in bounds as much as we just need to try to communicate with our students. Tina once asked Dr. Mason if it was more important that the students understand the whole message or each individual word. That is, how transparent does our speech need to be? Dr. Mason responded that the message is most important. The words will sneak into students’ unconscious minds and the students’ minds will do what comes naturally to humans – make sense of the language data and build a personalized linguistic system within the student’s mind. So we need to look our students in the eyes and make sure that they are with us on that level- the level of the message that we are trying to communicate. Therefore, we need to really prioritize teaching to the eyes. Susan Gross said it all when she said that phrase, which I was lucky enough to hear for the first time at one of her workshops in 2001.
It’s a good thing that non-targeted work frees up our mental energy and our emotions, because we need that energy to make sure that the students understand us. It’s not that non-targeted work requires more teaching to the eyes. We have needed that skill all along, because we needed to be looking at the students deeply all along, even with targeted stories, but I myself just could not relax enough to see the difference in my mental and emotional clarity that working without targeted language would make. If we just do that – look at the students and bring them along with us as we communicate understandable messages to them – we will stay in bounds naturally. The fact of the communication keeps us in bounds in the same way that an astrophysicist would not go out of bounds when using complicated scientific language when speaking to her teenage son.
