#eduspeak

From Larry Cuban.. As students, professionals, and parents, in the 20th and early 21st centuries, I, and most readers, have been the objects of these reforms, their implementers, or simply observers. School reform, then, is not something distant or far removed from our lives. We have experienced school reforms repeatedly. So, for me, school reforms have been as normal as breathing, eating,…

Rigor:

It is de rigueur.

Just parking this over here for my fellow educators.

The powers that be love to throw this around like so many words whose meaning has been sapped from years of abuse. As I mentally prepare for the coming year I must fortify my constitution against the blatant misuse of the English language that the corprocratic ladder-climbers and power-wielders use as a crude bludgeon. It can be soul-sucking when as the year grinds on you come up against people who just don't get it. But those of us who love to teach, who happily look upon the classroom as a lifelong laboratory of knowledge and joyful growth and not as a rung in the corporatized ladder to positions of administrative promotion know better. It is those who have stepped out of the classroom (or perhaps never really set foot in one), who bandy about this babbling bastardization of our means of communication.

"Sound and fury signifying nothing...." - Shakespeare always puts it best. The bard exemplifies the power of language, the power of words weighted with significance. Not the flaccid empty bag of a buzzword, but the fully-loaded linguistic luggage bursting at the zippers with meaning.

So, my fellow educators, I implore you: do not strive to """infuse rigor""" into your lessons. Just write good lessons. Lessons that challenge. Lessons that inspire. Lessons brilliantly designed to not only impart knowledge, but to rewire synapses, create and foster new ways of thinking. Inundate a student with facts she may pass a test; challenge a student to think critically, she’ll become a thinking adult -- something our democracy lacks and sorely needs.  

Do not find yourself limited and beaten by the buzzwordy battering of bureaucratic butchers. Transcend their limited scope. Laugh knowingly and inwardly when they ask if you are adding enough rigor. No, my dear teacher, you are adding more than that. You are adding nothing less than the ingredients for a lifelong love of learning. You are helping to cultivate the raw materials for the foundation of a monument to self-worth and the betterment of humanity. Fear not the rigor mortis that is de rigeuer. No. Embrace and refocus the joyful elucidating ray of creative energy.  Less rigor, more vigor!