Thursday, February 19, 2004
And now - presenting "Bafflegab"
First there was Orwell's 1984 and "newspeak", now there is 21st century "edu-speak". Just when kids are losing the skill of putting two sentences together, education boffins have renamed the paragraph a "brief constructed response", and the essay, an "extended constructed response". Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading has replaced, well, reading. In an article in the Vancouver Sun, Feb 4, Canadian education professor Thomas Fleming calls it "bafflegab", a jargon that makes it even more difficult for "students to understand what is pure, what is clear, what is right".
Try here for some more examples of bafflegab.
First there was Orwell's 1984 and "newspeak", now there is 21st century "edu-speak". Just when kids are losing the skill of putting two sentences together, education boffins have renamed the paragraph a "brief constructed response", and the essay, an "extended constructed response". Uninterrupted Sustained Silent Reading has replaced, well, reading. In an article in the Vancouver Sun, Feb 4, Canadian education professor Thomas Fleming calls it "bafflegab", a jargon that makes it even more difficult for "students to understand what is pure, what is clear, what is right".
Try here for some more examples of bafflegab.
