[Editor's note: This is what
we are getting for our $24B in tax dollars ... Gobbledegook!]
If your kid was terribly
scattered in class, would you want to know?
Or would you rather think he
was “using planning skills with limited effectiveness.”
That’s how Ontario’s
Ministry of Education suggests teachers write their report cards for kids
getting D’s. They aren’t struggling, floundering, falling behind. They are
“demonstrating limited understanding of content.”
I call this edu-speak. The
ministry calls it a “positive tone.”
Watch out. I’m writing about
the impenetrable language of report cards again. My
last column triggered dozens of emails and phonecalls — many angry —
from teachers.
“I don’t think anyone hates
those report cards more than the teachers writing them,” emailed Debby
Conderan, who retired eight years ago after 30 years teaching grades 3 to 8 in
the Peel District School Board. “They are edu-babble at its best. None of it
says what a teacher really wants to say.”
The dozens of working
teachers who emailed and phoned concurred. None of them wanted to be quoted by
name, for fear of reprisals. But all said they resent labouring for days over
reports which in the end, communicate little. Their hands are tied by three
things: conflict-averse principals, school board policies and angry mother-hen
parents.
They were furious that Ryan
Bird, spokesperson for the Toronto District School Board, had said teachers are
“encourage[d] to use language that parents will understand.”
Most teachers told me in no
uncertain terms that was not true.
One Toronto public primary
school teacher described his first “straightforward” report card comments
returning to his desk from the principal’s office. “I was told to be more
empathetic to how parents feel about their own children, to re-phrase my
wordings to be increasingly diplomatic,” he wrote in an email.
So instead of telling
parents their kid was disorganized and his desk was messy, the teacher now
writes: “Johnny consistently places his materials inside his desk in a random
order. He is highly encouraged to adopt a more streamlined organizational
style, so that during in-class work periods he is able to locate his documents
with greater ease.”
One teacher sent me the
Halton District School Board’s official teacher guide to writing “meaningful”
report cards. Teachers, it states, must use “asset language” versus “negative
or deficit language.” (The Toronto District School Board also prescribes “asset
language” to “encourage students without being blunt or negative,” says
superintendent Beth Butcher.)
An example? Instead of writing
Jill “inconsistently writes in her personal journal,” the Halton guide
instructs teachers to write: “With encouragement, she sometimes communicates
ideas clearly in complete sentences.”
“I can’t be honest,” the
teacher said over the phone. “Everything has to be positively written.” ... More
