raisinbran20 asked
At many schools, 6-year-olds don't compare books anymore -- they make 'text-to-text connections.' Misbehaving students face not detention but the 'alternative instruction room,' or 'reinforcement room,' or 'reflection room.' Children who once read now practice 'SSR,' or 'sustained silent reading.' And in Maryland, high schoolers write 'extended constructed responses' -- the essay, in a simpler time. Jargon has been a mainstay of bureaucracy for centuries, satirized in the works of Jonathan Swift and George Orwell. Education is particularly fertile ground: At school board meetings, stakeholders gather to align curriculum to content standards. Teachers learn to vertically articulate and differentiate instruction and give authentic, outcome-based assessments. Now -- with the teacher training industry uncommonly influential, children encouraged to think in more complex terms, and new tests and reforms each coming with its own vocabulary -- the vast menu of what's called eduspeak or educationese has oozed into the classrooms. A second-grade teacher announces 'modeling efficient subtraction strategies' as the task of the day, while 'selected response' has taken the place of 'multiple choice.' 'These are terms that will drive anyone to complete hysteria,' said Robert Hartwell Fiske, publisher of the Vocabulary Review and author of the forthcoming 'Dictionary of Disagreeable English.'
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