Edu-Speak Fatigue 101

I haven't posted for some six months or so, not that I haven't thought a bunch about it. Sometimes our lives take interesting twists and turns, and other priorities percolate to the surface, and although we mean to, we can't always find the time to pursue all we wish to address...Seinfeld once said, '...you can't have it all: where would you keep it!'

Darren Draper, in his (always extraordinarily insightful) blog recently touched on a nerve that has been rubbed raw with me recently, and stirred my normally pacifistic tendencies from their slumber. Although Darren wrote eloquently of his fatigue in his expertise, which is trying to educate, illuminate and introduce IT as an adjunct to classroom methodology, my fatigue, educational as well, is necessarily of a different bent.

I, too, am tired...after 34 years, I'm tired of edu-speak, babble, lip service, pontificating, politicizing, blather, fluff, burble, blab, jabber, mumbo-jumbo, chatter, gibberish, prattle, drivel, twattle, and just plain bullshit and invented modifiers concerning the latest in educational 'reform' and how to fix what's 'broken' in the classrooms of America. I am so tired of the focus on what's broken, and the lack of insight into what's working...unlike Darren, who is still relatively fresh in the business, I am bone-tired, 34 years tired, old-as-dirt tired of listening to the doom-sayers and evangelists with the next great fix. That's why I LOVE to read blurbs about what's right with education, and who is really making a change for the better.

In a recent faculty meeting at my middle-sized (1900+ students) sub-urban, progressive college-prep high school, we heard from our newly hired superintendent...a result of a 'state- legislature-meddling-in-education' law that allowed for our (successful, by most proxy measures) large school district to split into two more efficient districts (this decided by the same voters who, in lock-step, continue to elect the same legislature year-after-year that gives our classrooms the lowest per-pupil funding in the country). Although articulate and well-spoken, like most politicians, when pressed with questions about class size, he responded, also in lock-step, a need to adequately fund our schools and provide resources to lower our classroom sizes, etc., etc., etc., blah-blah-blah.

Having been 'laid-off' last year, after 33 years, as a result of declining enrollment, and watching my classrooms grow in size as they are shuffled off to teachers who neither want to teach the subject, or maybe shouldn't, the fatigue was so overwhelming one can only weep. I've served on every educational 'reform' committee over the years imaginable (and some you COULDN'T imagine), every school CSIP improvement committee, faculty advisory committee, school/community council, etc., only to watch our best and brightest in our business be ground into dust under the unbearable weight of educational red-tape and layer-on-layer of bureaucracy. Like Draper, I'm tired...and like him, I'm not ready to throw in the towel...

Miyamoto Mushashi, in his Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No Sho), prefaced saying at 57 or 58 it was time to put down his sword and pick up the pen after a lifetime of servitude as a samurai. There's a time and place to fight the good fight I read about in various educational musings. There is also a time to step back and reenter the fray with more effective strategies...