For this week’s Globe essay, I wrote a back to school piece. My kids go back on Wednesday–thank goodness! Sometimes at this time of year I feel as though I need my kids to be in school so that I’d have time to buy school clothes, supplies, lunch food and do all the things necessary to get them ready for school. Yes, I could have written a whole essay on that subject as well! But here is the piece I wrote–which is about the extremely careful language teachers use in and out of the classroom:
Back to
School sales, first day traffic jams, fresh notebooks, and curriculum nights
when parents squeeze themselves into miniature chairs to hear about first
grade. Some things never change. What does change, to my ear, is the lingo
educators use–language that seems to grow more circumspect each year. I already knew that my children were unique,
but I understand now that each learns differently to develop and extend
emergent skills. I had always
characterized my children’s behavior as good, decent, or atrocious. Their teachers never use these words, but
speak about challenges, ownership, and community.
I like this
sensitivity to language. Just as we’ve
banned corporal punishment from the classroom, we’ve banned verbal abuse. No self-respecting teacher screams, “You
idiots–what were you thinking?” And it’s certainly beyond the pale to call
students’ questions stupid, or tell them to shut the hell up when they talk in
class. Careful word choice creates an
atmosphere of respect in the classroom, and even outside, where students
unconsciously emulate their instructors.
In the heat of battle on the playground, one child screams at another,
“That’s not okay!” In the midst of a
tantrum over ice cream I refused to purchase, my six year old sobs to me, “I’m
very disappointed with you.” Children
learn a vocabulary of courtesy, as they would any other language, by ear.
Sometimes,
however, I sense a nervousness on the part of educators–an unwillingness to
speak directly. In the delicate patois
of the classroom, I strain to figure out what’s going on. A sensitive teacher will ask to speak to me
for a moment after school, and begin with a preamble about my daughter’s many
strengths. Only after long discussion of
her temperament and spirited character, do I begin to realize that something
happened that day. There’s been an
incident, but I can’t figure out what it was.
In the past, a teacher might have begun, “Your daughter got into a fight
today.” Now I have to press for details
of the case. I brace myself and
interrupt, “Just tell me–what did she do?”
If teachers tread carefully in conversation, elementary school report
cards read like runes. Gradually she is developing greater
sensitivity to others’ personal space . . .
An emergent reader, he has made great strides with books that interest
him. I appreciate the emphasis on
the positive and the emergent, but really–how is my kid doing?
Perhaps
schools fear lawsuits. What I see as
circumlocutions might well serve a legal purpose: educational fine print–the clauses necessary
to qualify and mediate every interaction in the partnership between school and
home. Tell me my child is evil or stupid,
and that could be actionable. Tell me my
child is special, and that’s the path to communication, teamwork, and extra
support. The trouble is that specialness
is so widespread. As Dash puts it in The Incredibles: saying everybody’s
special “is another way of saying nobody is.”
And so it’s hard to discern, these days, between garden variety special,
and special meaning gifted, and special as a euphemism for taboo terms like big
trouble. In a world where all the
children are above average, we still make judgments, we still evaluate skills
and aptitudes, but we pretend we don’t. When pressed, we develop an elaborate
apologetics about test scores. We talk
about the bigger picture; we take the longer view, and we abhor words like
success or failure.
I admit,
sometimes I long for straight talk and concrete details, less developmental
context, and more specific information about what teachers expect and whether
they are getting it. But while I mock
educational euphemisms, I find I can’t resist them. Scheduling an appointment for my son’s eye
exam, I heard a nurse say, “Okay. He
failed his initial screening?”
“He did not
fail!” I retorted, indignant. “He just
didn’t do as well as he could have . . .” I trailed off, and finished the mantra
silently: And with support, he’ll see just fine. Yes, as we used to say in the old days: my child needed glasses.
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