Many familiar experiences in a teacher’s day have never been dignified with a suitable word or phrase, whereas every new - and often wrong-headed - educational idea always comes gift-wrapped with a fancy name or acronym.
It’s time we turned that round. Time for a Dictionary of Real Teaching where some of those often meaningless, useless or overrated educational terms are given a given a new and more relevant meaning. For example:
Chunking: The act of brazenly refusing to admit to a class that we have got something hopelessly wrong and moving on remorselessly to the next issue in hand.
Cohort: A rude, arrogant parent.
Deep marking: Accidentally writing on the projector screen when mistaking it for the white-board.
Drilling down: The discreet re-positioning of an under-garment without anyone in the class noticing.
Ebacc: Internal exclamation of panic at parents’ evening upon realising that we have been reporting on the wrong child. Time to back-track rapidly or to start “chunking” (see above).
Flipped learning: A diabolically poor lesson.
Gibb: A dark stain on a teacher’s tie caused by over-hasty consumption of the canteen’s spaghetti Bolognese.
Gove: A pointless, repeated teacher action. For example, each time pulling open the desk drawer in the hope of finding a spare pen for the incorrigible Alfie, even though we already know that this drawer is a mere nursing home for a couple of broken old crayons.
Greening: Pretending not to understand a student’s lewd double entendre, for the greater good of the innocents in the class.
Literacy: A large number of children from the same challenging local family - as in “a literacy of Cragitts”.
Ofsted: Someone’s forgotten, salad-based lunch, slowly rotting in the staffroom fridge since September.
Pathways: The unspoken etiquette to use when passing colleagues in the corridor. Acknowledge them the first time you pass each other that day, laugh briefly when you inevitably cross in the other direction a few minutes later, then ignore on all subsequent corridor encounters that day.
Raising the bar: An older member of staff’s tedious habit of reminiscing about the time when all the staff used to go down the local pub on Friday lunchtimes
Toby Young: A hopeless, checkmate situation where the teacher finally realises that no change to the class seating plan will make any improvement, given the sheer number of high-maintenance students in that class.
Ucas: The “sweet” smell experienced when entering a recently-inhabited classroom.
Scaffolding: The careful engineering of a series of seemingly natural, unthreatening conversations with a new colleague, with a view to romance.
Sendco: The cheery student who always arrives early to the lesson and engages us in conversation just when we are trying desperately to unfreeze the computer screen.
WALT and WILF: A chronic fear of being told off by one of the caretakers.
Stephen Petty is head of humanities at Lord Williams’s School in Thame, Oxfordshire. For more from Stephen, see his back catalogue
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