When I grow up, I want to be a curriculum deliverer in a managed learning environment!
Tag Archive for 'jargon'
Candor and straight talk are rare in education, and euphemisms abound, observes Maureen Downey, the education columnist for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. At one level, the jargon can be amusing, such as the habit of referring to one of the buildings at her son’s school as the cottage. “Personally, I would describe the place where fifth-graders attend class as a trailer,” Downey writes. ”But then, I’m not an education professional.” More seriously, she notes that happy talk and edubabble contribute to parental mistrust of schools.
My husband and I once had a 10-minute sidewalk chat with a school consultant working at a local elementary school. After a conversation about psychometrics, scaffolding, formative assessments and zone of proximal development, we walked away asking one another, “What was she saying?” The use of education jargon serves as a defense mechanism, to keep parents at bay and to establish from the onset who is the expert and who is the amateur. It becomes a way to silence questions and squelch opposition.
Downey wonders if ”beleaguered and scapegoated” educators can afford to be honest and forthcoming. ”If principals admit to unhappy parents that a new teacher is not proving effective,” she points out, ”they may also have to tell those parents that they’re stuck with the teacher anyway, since it’s not an easy task to replace staff midyear.”
Writer and parent Maura J. Casey complains in the New York Times (So Is That Like An A?) about report cards in Hartford, Connecticut. The reports—clearly not cards—are up to seven pages long and grade a child on how he or she “establishes and maintains a healthy lifestyle by avoiding risk-taking behavior” and 57 other academic, social and behavioral criteria. In music class, for example, students are being graded on how they make “connections between music and other disciplines through evaluation and analysis of compositions and performances.”
It’s no mere rant. Casey points out that the academic measurements, which are designed to grade areas of student performance that are also measured on state standardized tests, seem more likely to confuse than illuminate. “I confess that as a parent, I’ve always focused on the basics. I want my children to be curious, enjoy learning, to read for pleasure, to be polite, to do their homework and to try not to hate school. If my kids got A’s or B’s, I got a pretty good sense that they were mastering the necessary skills. If they did much worse, I knew that it was time to call their teachers,” Casey writes.
In cities like Hartford, where many students come from non-English speaking homes, Casey points out that educational jargon like “uses numeracy and literacy skills to describe, analyze and present scientific content, data and ideas” seems destined to confuse, not clarify. “If report cards are weighed down with educational jargon that even native English speakers have to struggle to understand, ” she concludes, “it is fair to ask who the administrators are really reporting to: students and their families or the educational bureaucracy?”
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