Teacherspeak Part 3 (From B to G, with no O in the middle)

More “Teacherspeak” words – things you say as a teacher that would require a huge cloud of volcanic ash to prevent your words flying straight over a child’s head.

After “appropriate,” “audacity” and “apply,” I’ve managed to strain and squeeze out some more words for other letters of the alphabet.

B is for “bare minimum”, which is the amount of work you accuse students of having done when they’ve been lazy bastards. The student immediately considers phoning Childline when he or she gets home, because they think you said something about them having a “bare mini bum”, which is more than a little creepy, and equally disarming is the follow-up accusation that they’ve been “bone idle.”

Teacher: You’ve been bone-idle.
Student: Is that like Pop Idol, but for anorexics?

C is for "consistent". The expectation that if students can do something well, then they have to be able to do it well all of the time. If not, then they become inconsistent.

Teacher writes in mark book: Inconsistent effort.
Student reads in mark book: Blah blah blah effort.

D is for “develop.” You probably throw this word around all over the place. Most confusing is when used in the imperative tense.

Teacher: (Writes when marking) Develop your points a little more!
Student: (Reads) More points.

D is also for “detail.”

Teacher at parents’ evening: What she needs to do is to begin analysing the factors in order to reach an independent conclusion, and to do this, she must learn to make comparisons, evaluate the evidence, assess the different interpretations and communicate her judgements using substantiated evidence that she has selected discriminately from her own research.
Parent, turning to daughter: You hear that? You have to write in more detail.

E is for “exemplary.” A word which you will want to say a lot, won’t know how to spell until after the 100th report you write trying to incorporate it, and which students only understand, because it starts with the same prefix as “excellent.” It sounds like excellent, so it must mean something good. By that reasoning, you could get away with writing “execrable” effort in an exercise book and a student will glow with pride. Perhaps even the phrase, “Your work is excrement.”

F is for “Fuck’s sake,” which can be safely utilised in all of your numerous moments of frustration, because when said under your breath it sounds to everyone more than 2 metres away from you as something no worse an innocuous huffing and puffing.

G is for “gifted and talented,” the current buzzword for children who have a particular gift or talent for one or more areas of the school curriculum. The profession refuses to admit to itself that this form of labelling is immoral, despite willingly teaching students in History that the first of the eight stages of genocide is categorisation. By the time you read this guide, students across the country are likely to find themselves victims of the second stage of genocide, symbolisation. Wearing of Gifted and Talented badges will be made compulsory. Stage 3 is Dehumanisation. Given that the whole concept is about elitism, G and T students considered as being “above” others in terms of gifts and talents, therefore become the “super” men. And as we all know, Superman was an alien and thereby not human.

Stage 4 is organisation, so here at least the slippery path towards genocide grinds to a gradual crawl thanks to the inevitable mud of bureaucracy associated with getting anything done in teaching. It’ll be like trip organising, a process of paperwork, risk-assessment and impact-evaluation, which could only have been devised for satirical purposes by Franz Kafka. However, once accomplished, the fifth stage towards genocide, that is polarisation, comes into force. Logically, if a minority group are identified and labelled as Gifted and Talented, then the remaining majority become Ungifted and Talentless. Stage 6, the victims are identified for stage 7, the extermination. Stage 8 is denial, but I think I’ve given this now-deceased horse enough of a flogging.

Next week, the letter H onwards.

What you say to students: Teacherspeak (Part 2 - still "A")

Following on (as opposed to “following through” as I’ve heard people say in meetings, though never actually smelt them do) from the first blog about “Teacherspeak” - the condition in which you the teacher becomes “Lost in Teaching” by using language that is almost meaningless (or at best anachronistic) to students - I would like to move from the pointlessness of “appropriate” to another A-word you may feel a compunction to utter, and that is “audacity.” 

A strange old word this, in that it is flattering to be labelled “audacious,” as it suggests boldness in the face of overwhelming odds, and yet it is insulting to be charged with the crime of “audacity.” People have a right to be audacious, but no right to show audacity. That would be “entirely inappropriate!” 

Teacher: I’ve just caught you bunking out of school to go to the shop, and you have the audacity to eat that chocolate bar in front of me? 

Student: (Thinks) Audacity must mean teeth. 

These words are not the preserve of the more aged amongst your profession. Within months, even novice teachers are mimicking their older colleagues, having subliminally soaked up their parlance, and are already flopping their appropriates and audacities about all over the place. 

Not that I was intending to compile a whole A-Z of Teacherspeak, but the next is another word beginning with A and marks our journey from the spoken to the written word. You may consider this phrase technical language and therefore suitable for reports as well as oral interjections when students are not working hard enough: 

“You need to apply yourself more.” 

Now, the idea of applying anything without it coming out of a small, circular tin with a sponge and mirror is totally alien to a great many 15-year old girls. These are the same girls who think that a foundation tier is a blob of make-up not yet smoothed onto the skin rather than the exam paper that the less clever kids do. As for the boys, who knows how they translate the instruction to “apply themselves” more? It sounds rather too much like something they’d prefer to do behind a closed door and not in a classroom. As adults, the usage changes, and we all think of “applying” for jobs. And in the interviews we might get for those jobs, we don’t sit there and boast to the panel how we “apply ourselves a lot,” because that’s just Yoda’s way of saying he’s gone for loads of jobs and not had much luck. I’m tempted next to see if I can maintain this alphabetical run and impress you with a B, a C, a D and so on. Next blog next week, we’ll see…

What you say to students: Teacherspeak (part one - A)

Teacherspeak is the most conspicuous symptom of a condition known as Lost in Teaching. This condition can afflict sufferers to varying degrees and for irregular intervals, but in essence it describes an uncontrollable behaviour in which we make sense only to ourselves and make absolutely no sense to students. When it strikes you, it feels as if the whole world halts on its axis and its 6.5 billion inhabitants all telepathically tune in to what you’re saying and become both humoured and enlightened by your wondrous performance of pedagogy. 

That’s how it feels to you. How it looks to your class of students is that you’re suddenly talking bollocks, acting like a weirdo and have metaphorically disappeared up your own arsehole. 

 

What we choose to say to students when we use the sort of language that they would never themselves use nor fully understand, is Teacherspeak. Imagine Orwell’s Newspeak and stick a tweed jacket on it and you’ll get the picture. 

 

For starters, you won’t realise it at first, but after a while the word appropriate will become a malignant tumour on your daily vocabulary. No one uses the word appropriate as a child. Your average parents, assuming that they aren’t teachers of course, never have cause to inflict this insidious lexicological folly on their children; and adults tend only to use the negative form when laughing at innuendos or cheeky behaviour, fondly labelled as inappropriate. If I am wrong and you know someone who does use the word appropriate, but isn’t in fact a teacher, then the likelihood is that either they should be a teacher, or they have chosen another career in which the desire to self-righteously inflict their values on others and subsequently admonish them for their transgressions is equally fulfilled.  A football referee, a special constable, a retail manager, in fact the list might be endless. And that’s the problem with the word. It highlights the worst sensibilities of teachers. It inflicts their moral code on the students. And it is the last refuge of a bad rule. When there is no justifying the reason for telling a student to do something, you’ll fall back on this argument and end up saying that something is simply “not appropriate.” 

Student: Why can’t I? 

Teacher: Because it isn’t appropriate. 

Student: (Thinks) What the fuck does that mean? Who are you to decide what is and what isn’t appropriate without a reason to substantiate your judgment? And if you do have a reason, then you don’t really need to use the word appropriate at all, do you? 

Student: Why can’t I punch Liam in the face? 

Teacher: Because it will hurt him and you will infringe his human right to safety, a right which you would expect others to respect in regard to yourself. 

Student: (Thinks) I understood most of that reason, I think. Fair enough. 

 

Which is preferable to… 

Student: Why can’t I punch Liam in the face? 

Teacher: Because it is not appropriate. 

Student: Would it be more appropriate to kick him then? 

 

Now, just try to think of something, which would be seen as inappropriate and most of the time there’s a proper reason that can be cited instead. It isn’t just inappropriate for a teacher to have an affair with a student, it is wrong for a whole batch of reasons that I won’t choose to list here. (Not that it is not appropriate to list them, just that I can’t be arsed.) If you can’t think of a reason for deeming a particular action as inappropriate then the truth is that you just don’t like it– a matter of taste, not a matter of right and wrong. Blindly pontificating to a child that his or her behaviour is not appropriate (rather than expressing your opinion that it might be inappropriate and asking what they think themselves about it) is as bad as using a phrase which died out the last time a meteor hit the earth and caused an ice age – that phrase being the now exhausted pillar of English snobbery across all social classes: because I said so! 

 

Student: Why can’t I punch Liam in the face? 

Teacher: Because I said so. 

Student: And your omnipotence is such that I should consider this decree to be absolute and without recourse? 

Teacher: I have spoken. So let it be written, so let it be done. 

You’re not God in the fucking Ten Commandments, are you! If you are still telling kids to do something, because you said so, then piss off home and whip your own kids with a belt when they get back from the coalmine. There’s only one time that it is forgivable to resort to such a base, unfounded and tyrannical piece of reasoning as because I said so – and that’s when you simply can’t be bothered explaining the reason, because it’s too bloody long and students get bored of you talking once you reach your second sentence. This could in fact bring me to another issue, the inexorable urge to say too much; the fact that you as a teacher has as much capacity to be concise as you have ability to blow into your own arsehole. (See how I left that one open for the rare and talented exceptions!) No, I’ll come back to your loquaciousness later.