First off, I always though that Mark Twain had written that but I wanted to double check and sure enough, he ripped that quote off from someone else. It seems French philosopher Blaise Pascal (which clearly seems more like a pron name than the name of a famous thinker) made that sentiment famous about two hundred years before Mark Twain.
You see? I have already wasted a ton of words that I had not planned on writing.
The idea of the quote is that it takes significant time and effort in order to be concise. Unedited word vomit is easy... it is also a great band name... I'll have to write that down. You just sit down and spew literally everything that you have in your head. After all, it is all important so you wouldn't want to leave anything out. Like this explanation of the quote. I had to make sure to include that otherwise you wouldn't know why I tilted my post this way.
OK I'll stop with the over-the-top sarcastic example.
As a teacher, I have to be very careful to tell the students enough... without telling them too much. Even more importantly I need to help my co-teacher to do the same. You see, I'm a special education teacher which means I am certified to teach just about every subject. But because of this, I have become a Jack of all trades and master of none. Well that is exaggerating a bit as the one constant in my career is always teaching at least a couple World History classes each year. So I do know quite a bit about that subject... but I am still not a content expert like my partner is. For them, World History is their jam. They love it! They loved it in grade school. They loved it in High School. They loved it in... I forgot that I promised to stop. Because of this, they can sometimes forget that not every student loves it as much as they do. Students might not be interested in every detail that my co teacher has learned over the years. For many of them, just the basics can be challenging enough.
But do to their passion, my teaching partner can sometimes do what I call "Hitting the students with a fire hose". This just means that my partner is throwing so much information at them so quickly that they literally miss everything. Its exactly like drinking out of a fire hose. You're going to get wet... but your also still going to be thirsty... or miserable.
Another way I like to think about this is by saying "Everybody likes cake... but they don't want the whole cake jammed down their throat at once". History, like cake, needs to consumed in bite-sized portions. If you go too big, you miss the kids.
Now this guy LOVES him some History!
Yet another way I try to get people to understand this concept is by reminding my content expert colleagues that if everything is important... then nothing is important. I challenge them to look at their content and pick out the absolutely essential things students need to know so they can go on and lead successful lives. In very rare cases is the answer to that question "everything we do". Every class has some "nice to knows" vs "need to knows". I think good teachers know how to fight the right combination of those two to empower their students to succeed, keep them curious and interested, and inspire them to keep learning.
I think I'm going to be a good role model and stop this here.