A verbal river rock, worn smooth from use.
Today I have something to share with you. Where some people collect rocks, I collect and categorize the clichés specific to my job in education. I am not referring to clichés instructors use in the classroom – students already do a good enough job identifying these. I am referring to those that are heard amongst teachers/education professors/administrators.
Please gather round as we examine my collection (put together over the past semester with the help of a few friends in the biz). Some of them we will pass around and appreciate for their timeworn beauty. Others, due to their crimes against original thought and/or their implied ideas, will be skipped blithely across the water to sink into obscurity.
These rulings are final and not subject to appeal, thanks.
“Aha-moment!”
“Lightbulb moment”
These have been around as long as I’ve been teaching, both phrases used to describe the moment when students get it. They’re necessary clichés, I guess, as irksome and eye-roll-provoking as they may be. In my experience, though, it’s not so much a singular burst of illumination in a student’s mind, but more a gradual and hard-earned accumulation of knowledge. No harm in striving to deliver epiphanies to students, though. They may stay, these clichés.
“What is your why?”
A new variety of cliché that has sprung up in the past few years, sometimes expressed as “Remember your why.” Meant to ask what is your reason for entering the profession. The tone of the speaker always implies several question marks: “What is your why?????????” The gnomic phrasing is meant to add gravity. Unpack the spirit of these phrases, though, and we have enough evidence to make expel them forever. Wave goodbye to “what is your why?”
“End with an exit ticket!”
“Make a rap!”
“Make it a board game!”
Common refrains in professional developments and education classes when I was in college. Exit tickets endure in some form or another, a valid way to formatively assess student learning at the end of a lesson, made easier with Google Forms. As for rap…attempts to incorporate student rap into the classroom have mostly died away. Students find it so embarrassing (the potential for it to be filmed and shared on social media) that it has come full circle and, from my perspective, become cool and subversive again. Board-game projects contain too many diminishing returns to be an effective use of time, sorry.
“If you can’t do _, go work at McDonald’s”
“We got into this to make a difference, not make a living”
“It’s not the income, it’s the outcome”
Nasty little slogans used to put teachers and aspiring-teachers in their place. I heard the first one from education professors and from a principal I worked for a long time ago.
The less said about the other two, the better. Their intention to minimize the concept that teachers should earn a livable wage earns these clichés a great chuck into the void.
“Grace”
This word got used a lot during COVID as a catch-all for the concepts of patience or empathy. We must show students grace, we must have grace shown to us as teachers, etc, etc. Grace grace grace. This was of course mostly being said by people lacking a great deal of patience and empathy, so maybe that’s why I can’t abide it, and I must demand that it be removed (with grace!!!) from our professional lexicon.
“I don’t teach books, I teach skills.”
An English-teacher-specific cliché, and a gross insult to fine literature. Skills have their place, but one of the things that elevates English over the other core disciplines is the amount of art we have the privilege of exposing to our student, and the amount of freedom we have at curating a syllabus. For instance, I am proud to teach Animal Farm, and obviously I incorporate a variety of skills in reading the book. Yet even without those lessons, it is a still a book that deserves to be read and appreciated on its own merits as a good book, an entertaining and provoking tale. Same for Pride and Prejudice, Into the Wild, Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” and “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Their merits as soul-affirming literature make me excited to teach every day. To view texts as a means to an end is a joyless way of approaching an English class. Everyone wave farewell to this haughty cliché.
“It feels like a Friday, despite it being Thursday! [or other variations]”
“The weekend went by way too fast. “
Used to hate these, now I love them. General work clichés, pleasant and benign, comforting in their ritualistic recital. I think they call this Stockholm Syndrome.
“You kids are addicted to your phones.”
“These kids just don’t know how to _ anymore because they’re always on their phones/iPads”
“It wasn’t like that when I was a kid”
“They have to be held accountable; no one’s holding them accountable anymore!”
I enjoy complaining, but I don’t like complaining without creativity or specificity. Give me specific examples, or employ some entertaining linguistic dexterity in describing your problems. These clichés will no longer be tolerated.
“Kids don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”
“Every day’s an opportunity, not an obligation.”
Both trite (or cringe, as the youth might say, fr fr ongod), and both are 100% true. I think about the principles of both saying every day, pleasant river stones rolling about in my mind.