Humour

Weasel Words In Education Part 3: “Monitor” and “Track”

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Monitor (v.) and Track (v.). Examples: “What system have you in place to monitor departmental results?” or “What are you doing to track the progress of underachievers in Y10?”

Meaning: set up a colour coded Excel spreadsheet. (Usually traffic light influenced e.g. red for danger etc).

Each of these should be an entirely bespoke document — you wouldn’t want departments or schools to actually share a common format, would you?

Some teachers actually use conditional formatting formulas to get the cells to change colour automatically; however, a typical SLT member generally does not care about this provided: (a) there are lots of colours; and (b) there are lots of numbers and letters (or “data” in quotation marks — generally, just randomly generated* numbers and letters will do.)

* Just make sure that the randomly generated numbers display a slight upward drift (or “progress over time”) for a quiet life…

Weasel Words in Education Part 2: Work Smarter, Not Harder

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Work Smarter, Not Harder!

This is an increasingly common phrase in the education world.

It means, basically, work harder! [FX: WHIP CRACK]

It is often associated, strangely enough, with very poorly thought-out initiatives. Some cosmic karmic balance demands that a lack of cognitive effort by the management is balanced by an excess of cognition by the hapless underlings affected.

Rumour has it that this is especially prevalent in schools that have added the word “Academy” to their letterheads and logos, but scholars disagree if this is a case of causation or mere correlation.

Weasel Words in Education Part 1: Intervention

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Intervention (n. and v.)

– as in “What interventions have you put in place?” or “We’ll have to intervention this!” or (even more common) “You’ll have to intervention this!”

Meaning: doing stuff of doubtful or unclear efficacy mainly for the sake of being seen to do some stuff.

Some words sound better than others. For example, “I kicked some butt at work today!” sounds better than “I wrote a stiffly-worded email to query an invoice.”

So with the word intervention. “I staged an intervention to address underachievement in the Year 10 target group” does sound more dynamic, proactive and energetic than “I got a bunch of Year 10s to stay behind after school and nagged them for a bit.”

This is a word beloved of SLTs* and similar riffraff. Essentially, it is a long-winded way of “Do something!”. The unspoken subtext that should be tacked on to the end is “…so that I don’t have to.”

Most interventions happen outside of the normal school day. After school interventions are a perennial favourite. Never mind that most researchers (correctly, in my opinion) identify such activities as “High Effort, Low Impact.”

When the test scores are down and the going gets tough, the tough get . . . some unenthusiastic kids together in a room and read some powerpoint slides at them. Or, get them to do some card sort activities, where cutting out and laminating the cards takes up to seventeen times longer than the bloody card sort activity itself takes to do. Or, nag them. Yes, nag them with as much energy, sincerity and passion as you can summon at the end of a full teaching day when you are knackered and bursting to go the loo.

This is the way to the educational promised land, my friends. To a better place that is overflowing with the milk of EBaccs and the honey of Ofsted-approval, and yet which remains free of the evil spectre of grade inflation!

Let us all put interventions in place now! Interventions today! Interventions tomorrow! Targeted interventions for all!

After all, its not as if the kids were actually taught this stuff in lessons during the normal school day, is it? I mean, it stands to reason, doesn’t it? It’s not their fault that they weren’t listening/trying/paying attention, is it? Otherwise, they wouldn’t need all these sodding ‘interventions’ all the time…

*Senior Leadership Team

Not The-Perfect-Sphere-Assumption-Chicken-Joke

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Farmer Jenkins was justly proud of his free-range chicken farm, and particularily of Griselda, his prize layer. So, it came as no surprise (at least to him) when he placed highly in the All-England Free Range Egg Taste Challenge. “Don’t you worry, lass,” he cooed to Griselda as his Range Rover purred through the warm summer night, “next year we’ll come first, I promise.”

Griselda continued sleeping in her carry case, seemingly comforted by the presence of the garish gold-painted plastic statue by her side, which featured a chicken contorted to form an approximation of the numeral 2.

On a whim, Farmer Jenkins locked the award in his office safe when he got home, and returned Griselda to her roost with reverential gratitude.

The next day he unlocked the safe to retreive the award. He had a fair bit of trouble opening the door. “That’s strange,” he murmured, bending down to examine the obstruction. It appeared that the award had somehow moved in the night and jammed part of the door mechanism. “H’mmm, how did that happen?” Farmer Jenkins shook his head. The award appeared . . . bigger, somehow. But surely that was impossible. However, what troubled Farmer Jenkins most of all was the fact that the plastic chicken, what he could see of it, at least, now appeared contorted into the shape of the numeral 3.

As he telephoned his friend Brian to share his puzzlement, he heard a metallic tearing. He stared dumbfounded at an apparition of a plastic chicken rearing above the torn remnants of his safe. And now the wings and body of the plastic fowl appeared to form the numeral 4.

“Did anyone touch it?” asked Brian urgently over the crackly landline connection

“No, no-one,” said Jenkins with certainty.

“Ah, that explains it,” said Brian.

“It does?”

“Oh yes,” concluded Brian. “You see, in an isolated system, hen trophy will always increase.”

Desert Island Graphs

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In Britain, being invited on the BBC radio programme “Desert Island Discs” is an accolade roughly equivalent to being knighted. Guests are invited to choose six records that they might take with them to a desert island.

The recent episode with Stephen Pinker reminded me of a variant that I’d pitched to the BBC’s Head of Light Entertainment not so long ago. In “Desert Island Graphs” a panel of notable scientists sit around and hold a no-holds-barred humorous roundrobin discussion of which six graphs they’d carry with them to a desert island.
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My own perennial favourite is of course the old Binding Energy per Nucleon against Nucleon Number because it is a wonderful illustration of how basic physics affects the unfolding of the universe: large red giant stars cook up each of the elements in turn up to iron before “sploding” (thank you Ricky Ricardo) as a supernova (“Wha’ ‘appen?!?”).

To say that my overtures were brutally rejected would be an understatement. As a matter of fact, the then Head of Light Entertainment threatened not only to have me hunted down and killed, but to have my hometown napalmed and the ground sown with salt.

There’s just no pleasing some people….