This word is shared as part of the Words We Love Substack Carnival, a lexicon of lovable language compiled by some of your current or future favorite educators and writers on Substack. Enjoy all the Valentine’s Day vocabulary on the Words We Love 2025 page.
My word is automaticity – the quality or fact of performing skills with little thought or effort. Here are a few examples:
A driver chats with a friend. He’s not thinking about the mechanics of driving or the definitions of words. (Those are automatic.) He’s focused on the conversation.
A point guard sets up a play. She’s not thinking about how to run, or how to dribble a basketball.
A professional musician plays the blues. He’s not thinking about how to play his instrument or struggling to follow the chord progression. He’s focused on coming up with ideas and making them sound good with the rest of the band.
Automaticity allows us to execute important skills quickly and accurately. More importantly, it frees us up to acquire and wield more complicated skills.
It’s essential in math. Consider these two questions:
The first requires addition and subtraction (180 degrees in a line, 180 degrees in a triangle). The second requires a proportion (which requires multiplication and/or division). In both cases, you could just use a calculator…but if you’re relying on a calculator to solve these problems, you’re probably incurring math debt. Every question will take a little longer. You’re more likely to make mistakes. And it will get harder and harder to acquire new concepts.
A question like this becomes very challenging when arithmetic isn’t automatic:
To solve this correctly, you not only have to be comfortable with solving systems of linear equations (and the techniques that might entail)...you still have to notice patterns in the numbers! In this case, a student with strong mental math skills will notice that adding the two equations will yield 9x - 9y = 63. She’ll note that all three terms are divisible by 9, which results in x - y = 7. And since the question is asking for x - y, the answer is 7.
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