The Jargon Jungle: Edition 1

As summer marches inexorably on, thousands of new teachers around the state are preparing for their first classroom assignments. While I can't offer any better suggestions than those so thoughtfully compiled by the most excellent Ms. Cornelius, I can help out by offering more relevant definitions to the many educational buzzwords that new teachers are forced to learn and veteran teachers try desperately to ignore.

I'm always looking for suggestions for more buzzwords--feel free to leave your "favorites" in a comment, and look for them to appear in future editions of The Jargon Jungle, a repository for busted buzzwords, idiotic idioms, and necrotic neologisms.

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Highly-qualified teacher: ('hI-lE 'kwä-l&-"fId 'tE-ch&r) [n] a teacher who naively believes he/she has all of the classes necessary for his/her certification.

Transmitter of knowledge: (tran(t)s-'mi-t&r 'äv 'nä-lij) [n] a small electronic device implanted into a student's brain that shocks them every time they even THINK about text-messaging during class.

Collaborative decision-making: (k&-'la-b&-"rA-tiv di-'si-zh&n 'mA ki[ng]) [v(t)] the process by which a person within a group ends up doing all of the work because everyone else makes the decision not to.

Block-of-time schedule: ('bläk 'äv 'tIm 'ske-(")jül) [n] not to be confused with "amoeba of time schedule", the block of time schedule is a rigidly structured period of time that must be kept frozen at 32F or below, or else it will melt into an unrecognizable puddle of unstructured activity.

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This concludes the inagural installment of The Jargon Jungle. Tune in next week for the second edition, and feel free to leave suggestions for words you would like to see in future installments.