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Outrages

  

9486 in the collection  

    Wannabe education reformers in the U.S. need to use English

    Ohanian Comment: Good for Sherman Dorn! We are in danger of allowing this business jargon to become so commonplace that it's acceptable. Call the bastards out, and certainly call out our professional organizations and unions when they stoop to this level of language abuse which has a way of ending up as teacher abuse and child abuse. To wit:


    I believe we have an obligation to make it clear that the phrase "systematic, direct, and explicit" has been kidnapped by those who favor scripted teaching even though it is a guiding factor for presumably all effective teachers. The most outspoken critics of this bill have acquiesced to the assumption that this term can only mean scripted instruction. . . .It is time to reclaim those three words for instruction that is not scripted, but student-centered; not textbook-driven, but needs-driven; not prescriptive, but responsive. NCTE is developing a rich bank of effective instruction (some already evident through our Pathways professional development work) in a range of areas and for a range of students.
    --Kylene Beers,immediate past-president NCTE, in Defense of LEARN (sic) Act on
    NCTE ning.

    Lewis Carroll's famous Humpty Dumpty quote comes to mind.


    I have taken on "incent" a few times, including this post:

    U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced that under a special teacher incent program, Tattoos for National Standards, $666 million is now available for individual teachers to participate in a new branding stimulus.
    The Eggplant



    by Sherman Dorn

    Confession: I do not have a professional editor review these blog entries before they become publicly available. As a result, there is the odd grammatical error that I notice only after publication.

    And yet, I do not abuse the English language deliberately. In contrast, one of the least attractive stylistic tendencies of wannabe reformers, reformists, reformistas, or whatever term you wish to use, is the blatant word abuse, and unfortunately we see that in Tom Vander Ark's blog entry Dec. 26 impact and leverage (ab) used as transitive verbs. They are not quite as chalkboard-scraping as incent (which I have heard and read from Arne Duncan and Mike Petrilli), because they do exist as nouns (and impact does not hurt my inner ear when used as an intransitive verb). But good grief, friends: do not add business jargon monoxide to the conversation, or you have no ... hmmn... leverage with which to criticize others for the same sin.

    — Sherman Dorn
    blog
    2010-01-01
    http://www.shermandorn.com/mt/archives/003146.html

    INDEX OF OUTRAGES

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