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.