Gosh, but aren’t we humans dazzling apes sometimes! This paragon among animals, with snappy synapses aplenty. And sometimes these brainy zaps twist themselves around the very words that we speak and write. Especially when we get creative with the language and use all manner of elliptical expressions.
When traveling through the golden realms of education, this rage for order in economy in language is certainly felt. Such was my thought when I learned yet another initialism, PLC, or professional learning community, in recent months, further fueling the ca(u)se of acronymania in academe . . .
Be advised. Acronyms and initialisms rule the wild and woolly hallways of the Patton, Pope, and Pulaski middle schools of America. In this walled ecosystem, Pope Middle School transubstantiates into PMS, which, callooh callay, is good for at least a half-chortle or full snort. Especially among this goofy-footed cohort.
Once upon a time, I worked in a liminal space adjacent to the medical field, so I lugged that lexicon with me into secondary education several years ago. For a word nerd like me, understanding my new environment meant going “all in” on a whole ‘nuther dictionary. Some terms were obvious in meaning and origin, such as the abbreviation admin to mean administrators such as principals or APs (pronounced a-peas), assistant principals. Other phrasings, not so much. The first half-dozen times someone mentioned a meeting being held in the PCR, I was baffled what relevance polymerase chain reactions could even have to education, COVID (another weighty word) notwithstanding. The location — principal’s conference room — simply wasn’t relevant to my job function at the time. To borrow from another world with self-inflicted jargon wounds, it was above my pay grade.
In this walled ecosystem, Pope Middle School transubstantiates into PMS, which, callooh callay, is good for at least a half-chortle or full snort.
But as I relaxed into life in the SPED lane, as a newbie in SPecial EDucation, the opaque became clearer, if not quite transparent. “At-a-glance IEPs” fired a light bulb that now signaled to me, “Oh yeah . . . those worksheets which distilled the more complex IEP reports into a checklist of accommodations needed by each student in the SPED program for that teacher, that block.” IEP denotes an Individualized Education Program, usually in the form of an IEP document, that enable students with disabilities to receive a free and appropriate public (school) education, or FAPE. All this wordplay moves us toward the laudable goal to create the least restrictive environment, or LRE, possible for children in our special education population.
The IEPs themselves can be confusing at best for educators-in-training, never mind parents. These legally binding contracts couch themselves in educa-medical (my own portmanteau word) terminologies, again heavy on the acronyms and initialisms. First there’s OHI, other health impairment, which houses conditions like Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (or ADHD; ADD is no longer favored); then ASD, autism spectrum disorder; and SLD, a specific learning disability. SLD is defined as a disorder in one or more of the basic psychological processes involved in understanding or using spoken or written language that may appear as an inconsistent ability to listen, think, speak, read, spell, write, or do mathematical calculations.
As I alluded, there are both serious and comical ramifications of educational argot. I take my job seriously, but it was coffee-spittingly difficult when I first “met” one acronym in particular. I would be remiss in this extended anecdote if I didn’t mention one state’s possibly tongue-in-cheek application of acronyms. The cavalier’s crown I have to hand to one Southern state alone. Yes, Virginia, there is a cherubic Santa Claus — of Comic Proportions. He lives within standardized state tests in the Old Dominion. There, SOL testing doesn’t NECESSARILY mean you’re shit-out-of-luck, either as student or educator. Rather, it means Standards of Learning. As initialisms go, ess-oh-ell testing takes the cake (especially when it’s thrown in Three Stooge-esque style).
Virginia’s SOL tests themselves are serious business, from what I understand. But I digress from SPEDland.
So it happens that during my second year, Connor, one of my SPED charges with an IEP for a medical condition, who is incorporated in the LRE gen ed pop, commits an infraction and is written up, receiving a one-way ticket to ATS, or the alternative to suspension program, instead of only a stern talking-to by admins or, worse yet, a referral from the SRO, a sworn (certified) law enforcement officer attached to a school or district to keep the educational peace.
All these things I have learned from my own teachers (teachers teaching teachers? teachers squared?), through mandated mini-classes or online training sheltered under the PD (professional development) umbrella — or I have absorbed them from students and colleagues and from doing my own reading of education-focused tomes, blogs, newsletters, and websites such as TPT, or Teachers Pay Teachers.
SOL. Standards of Learning. As initialisms go, ess-oh-ell testing takes the cake (especially when it’s thrown in Three Stooge-esque style).
All of this riffing on the educational lexicon is not at all to diss tinkering with the language to simplify, to elide, or to enhance memorization (not to mention understanding). For instance, it clicks with my verbal mind to think of calculating the number of protons, neutrons, and electrons in an atom using the “APE MAN” mnemonic, which I have zero recollection of from my own middle-school days, because it likely didn’t exist three decades ago. Likewise, for memorizing the steps for the bill-making process in American Politics: I Will Drive Very Slowly (Introduce-Work on in Committee-Debate-Vote-Send to President). Such memory supports can be crucial to getting the basics down for many a subject . . . GEMDAS/PEMDAS, which has pushed out the MDAS, My Dear Aunt Sally, of my generation, I’m looking at you!
All this linguistic lacrosse tickles a patch of my brain dedicated to grad-school memories. Literature professor Dr. Frederick (later my thesis chair) first illuminated ee cummings’ philosophy of homo ludens, or man at play, for me. Since then I’ve been indebted to him for the concept, and many other things literary and besides.
The need for mnemonics, initialisms, acronyms, portmanteaus, abbreviations, and linguistic puppeteering in general will never cease. And, as a person who had to memorize both Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and Marc Antony’s “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech in middle and high school, respectively, I am mighty glad that cleverness and flexibility with language, which delight the descriptivist in me, shall not perish from the earth. Be it an educated sphere or otherwise.
So, do not pity the busy monster that is humankind. Why? Only because wordplay isn’t dead.
Long live wordplay!
