Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Fuck-My-Brain Words for Today


1. student success

2. assessment

3. long-commute disability

4. student-centered learning

5. colleague

6. extra credit

7. administration

8. any kind of "initiative"

9. committee

10. _____________

40 comments:

  1. Extra-credit-to-replace-the-extra-credit-assignment-that-I-could-not-do

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  2. Action plan.

    I always wonder whether the administrator advocating an action plan is going to pop into a phone booth, and emerge in a cape and tights. Most administrators would not look good in tights: if they do this, I'm leaving.

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  3. Game-based immersive learning.

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  4. Game-based immersive learning.

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  5. Organizational core values.

    Learning community.

    Task force.

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  6. Peer Evaluation Committee

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  7. Anything followed by the word "project".
    Anything following "21st century".

    Waiting for our first "21st century _____ project" to be announced.

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  8. institutional assessment

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  9. Say, have any of you folks ever played "Bullshit Bingo?" It's fun, and can liven up even the deadliest meeting.

    You make up a bingo card, with a 5 rows of five squares (a 5x5 matrix, for you math enthusiasts). In each square, write one of the words or phrases that are mentioned above. Make the middle square a free one, to make the game go faster.

    Then mix up the words, and make another, similar card. Then mix up the words again, make a similar card, and repeat this until you have as many different cards as you like.

    Then, give these cards to like-minded colleagues, just before the start of a meeting you know will be really dull. As the meeting progresses, whenever one of these words is used, whoever has this word gets to cross it out on their card.

    Whoever is first to get five words in a row, or in a column, or diagonally, gets to jump up and yell, "BULLSHIT!" Suddenly, everyone will start to look forward to meetings...

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  10. Service.

    Maybe I'm just a terrible person*, but the phrase "Passion for Service" seems so cliche to me...
    And looking back, I swear nearly every student or faculty member highlighted by my undergrad school was chosen because of his or her "passion for service." Apparently we weren't really into research, scholastic achievement, or even athletics, but we served the community; oh yes, we served the hell out of it.

    *I'm really not that terrible, I don't think. I volunteer with any projects that are meaningful to me. I just never got into the college-sponsored (and publicized) service culture...

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  11. "Professionalism" - usually heard from someone criticizing me for losing my temper at the pusillanimous fuckstickery that passes for professionalism at Tuk U.

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  12. ...and from the public school perspective:

    Core Curriculum

    Common Core Standards

    SLOs

    PARKS

    P20

    APPR

    Value-added

    Koch(fucking) Brothers

    Bill Gates

    "suggested" morphing to "prescriptive"

    English as a content area morphing to ELA

    Tests that do not yet exist in ANY form that we must nevertheless be able to demonstrate we are "preparing" the current cohort to master

    Tier 7,952 Retirement ("Please, sir, could I retire at 87?")

    Hear me: There are problems in public schools. There are problem public--and private and charter--schools. Those need immediate and heavily-monitored addressing. But some schools do good work. Some programs deliver incredible bang-for-the-buck. Some teachers teach kids--sometimes well. We are not, despite the insistence on one our local law-enforcement officers in an assembly at my school--all either "groomers" or "pedophiles" (if we have and maintain an online presence). It is crazyland in America today, and it is exhausting.

    For the record, I am not at all sure that I have recorded each of the items on my list correctly; I have never seen "PARKS" nor "P20" in print--they are waaaay new all up in here!--but they are in place and in play.

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    Replies
    1. My response to Mr. Cop is: www.reddit.com/Bad_Cop_No_Donut. This is a sub-forum on the news aggregator site Reddit....pretty much every police department has some sort of problem, from corruption to incompetence to trigger-happy fuzz who shoot dogs and people for no damn good reason. In fact, if they did the sort of testing for police that they do for school teachers, they would probably lose a third of their force. So in other words, your cop can fuck off.

      Delete
  13. It happens in business, also. One of the most ridiculous things I read was a rah-rah letter from management that had the line, "We must enhance our performance by leveraging our solutions."

    ???????????

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    Replies
    1. Wow. That is a Bingo! (Is that how you say it? - 'that is a bingo'?)

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    2. Hmmm. Maybe closer to the truth is: "That is a bullshit."

      Delete
  14. FML has it. "Retension" is the big one missing from the original list.

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  15. Replies
    1. Hey, Thomas Kuhn wasn't all bad. In "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," he also wrote:

      "[Physics] is a narrow and rigid education, more so than any other, except perhaps orthodox theology."

      I fell off the chair when I read that.

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    2. @Frod - There is a big-name intellectual over in Europe who wrote a big, fat, popular book summarizing what education is and what you need to know to have an educated mind. In it, he wrote that mathematics and the natural sciences aren't really "education," just facts, raw materials essentially. Unbelievable.

      Delete
  16. Metric (the new rubric, now that we've found ways to use those for good)

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  17. Ooh! Evaluative metrics; qualitative metrics (they're being forced down our throats here as we speak).

    Incidentally, POST OF THE WEEK. SERIOUSLY. How did I miss this one?

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