My mentor was one of the fathers of the Internet. He was responsible for one of the most commonly used network test tools ever ping.
He was a subject matter expert in dozens of different areas; networking was just one of them.
After he died in a car accident, I moved into other areas, programming and learning new things. I quickly learned to ask people what terms and acronyms actually meant. The reason? Often I would know the thing they were referring to, but not that particular term.
This made me look like an ass. They would be talking about “jargon,” and I would be lost. They would explain what the jargon term meant, and I would suddenly be an expert. It wasn’t sudden; I just didn’t know what they were referring to to begin with.
The education industry is the worst for this. They change their terminology almost every year. This is very frustrating.
There is an entire set of students that cannot function in English. They don’t speak it, they can’t read or write it, and they don’t understand spoken English.
In other words, they are children of immigrants, both legal and illegal, with no English skills. This requires entire cadres of teachers to deal wtih.
The term I first heard for these students was “They had English deficiencies.” Of course they were functionally illiterate in English.
Then the term changed; they were children with “English as a Second Language”. This rapidly morphed into “ESL” students.
I teach ESL to friends in Brazil via Google Hangouts. There is no shame in not being literate in English if you live in a country where English isn’t the primary langauge.
I recently heard a teacher describe his school as being 1/3rd ESS. Huh?
Translation: ESS is the replacement for ESL. This is the education industry’s politically correct way to say “students who are functionally illiterate in English”. A third of the student population. Ouch.
Over time I’ve watched the term “pupil” morph to “student.” It still felt the same to me. The concept is one of a person learning from a teacher. A teacher is responsible for teaching pupils and students.
They changed the term again. The new term is “learners”.
This is a horrible term. Not all children are learners. Not all children are self motivated to learn. Learning is a skill we teach and we hope our children learn.
If a learner fails, the teacher is no longer the obvious responsible person.
I am so tired of trying to figure out what the term de jure is.
I totally agree with you here. In the 40 years that I’ve been an educator the acronyms change so fast that your head will spin. Not only that. But there are sometimes different acronyms, or different words from school district to school district. I recently changed school districts. I’m still in the same state, but some of the words have changed. I’m ready to teach a class called “Teacher Speak” where I just teach the new terminology for the week!
the company I work for is big on “jargon”. managers spew 3 letter things and we are all supposed to know wtf (haha) they are talking about… I just tune it out. when ever a manager is speaking it reminds me of Charlie Browns teacher….
One of my favorite three letter acronyms is “TLA”. 🙂
Jargon is unavoidable in technical or scientific fields, because you’re dealing with stuff that isn’t covered by the word set of “ordinary English”. Whether you’re dealing with medicine, flying, skydiving, or computer networking, you run into this. But for these fields, the jargon doesn’t change much. New terms get added for new things, and when something is found to be misleading a new term or set of terms is introduced.
On the other hand, when you have quack pseudo-fields like education (in the sense of what “educators” and “education” departments of “universities” do, not the teaching of pupils that is done by actual teachers) the purpose of the jargon is obfuscation and political power, and for that reason the jargon changes constantly.
You see the same thing at work, for the same reason, in “HR” departments. I remember when those departments were called “personnel”, even the department name is subject to this effect. Similarly management, for the same sort of reasons.