Ah yes. Perhaps one of the reasons that education has no real jargon–and needs none–is because it is involved with pretty simple basic concepts that are so easily and concisely expressed and understood in plain English that jargon is unncessary. Of course, buzzwords are annoying, uninformative and even obstructive.

Everyone and anyone knows what “good teaching” means, likewise, “bad teaching.” “Learning?” Needs no improvement. But education is, as you suggest, just full of buzzwords. This is particularly bad in places like Texas which has a huge, overarching education bureaucracy. The entire state is divided up into regions and in each region a “service center” which is full of “consultants” who sally forth to the school districts to serve as “facilitators.” As you might imagine, these consultants seem to have very little to do, so they spend a great deal of time coming up with buzzwords.

In a class through which I suffered a few years back, here are a few
examples:

Manipulables–English translation: staplers, pencils, anything you can pick up and “manipulate.”

Gallery Walk–English translation: Walking around a room and looking at stuff on sheets of butcher paper taped to the walls.

Facilitator–English translation: Ridiculously over-qualified and paid, and underworked education consultant.

Of course, they were very big on acronyms too, apparently feeling the compulsion to come up with new acronyms for easily understood and long serving acronyms. ESL (English as a Second Language), is now, for example, ELL (English Language Learner). That certainly clarifies things, now doesn’t it?

In such classes, I consider myself fortunate to escape with minimal brain damage, having understood years ago that the content will, on my “egregious waste of my time” meter, be off the scale.

What they really mean is, “chronic emoting skills.”

It’s one in which the teacher feels good.

Plodding along through a text that you’ve used 6 years in a row is not exciting to the teacher. That’s not fun, that’s a job.

Is there any possibility that the phrase “content-centered” will catch on?

A word can have more than one meaning (we call that ambiguity), but a word can’t mean anything you want it to mean (we call that Lewis Carroll).

Well written! :) My particular bugaboo is “critical thinking skills”. I hate that one.

*This* is the head of a nail.

Whack!