Depending on when they went to school, elementary teachers were taught different methods of teaching reading. The approach they choose in their classrooms and the terminology defining it keeps changing. They are given a package to teach, proscribed minutes to devote to this effort, and schools often pay a lot of money to provide direction in the manner and method of delivering reading instruction. Every new packaging of education receives a new name. Often the new name describes something that’s been common practice in the past.

I used to call the affection education academics have for recreating terminology every few years “educationalese.” I created a satirical glossary as part of my term project for an Ed Psych class decades ago. [Persuasive writing has had several names over the years: persuasion, argumentative, position paper, essay, etc. It’s all the same thing. You’ll find my glossary below.] Since I mostly have taught high school students, my focus was on writing. In elementary school there is open warfare about how to teach children to read.

Educators around the country have embraced the “science of reading” in their classrooms, but that doesn’t mean there’s a truce in the reading wars. In fact, controversies are emerging about an important but less understood aspect of learning to read: phonemic awareness.

—KQED

From what I understand, for a time teachers taught students the sounds made by letters in isolation from the physical letters themselves. They conducted reading classes entirely with sound and without the letters? I find this hard to fathom. Perhaps I am missing something here. And then there was “phonics”. Now the newest science is to teach the sounds in connection with the visual appearance of the letters. [This is new? It requires studies to prove it works? I want to shriek! You think?!] As if it were surprising that connecting the sounds of letters to their appearance on the page as a part of learning to read were not perfectly obvious. My husband Gary points out that learning both appearance of letter and the unique sounds they represent was essential when he was learning the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) while studying Puget Coast Salish. He also walked around the house making sounds peculiar to my ear because Salish included a wider range of sounds than English.

A recent article from Mind/Shift points out that particular training of what they call “phonemic awareness” is especially helpful to children with dyslexia. [You can find the term phonemic awareness in Wikipedia.] Instead of teaching reading by focusing entirely on the sounds, they specifically urge teaching the physical letter with the sounds it makes. We called that “sounding out a word” when I was a child. Think, perhaps, flash cards with a letter C, the letters in a word C A T, with both the visual appearance of the letter and the sounds taught simultaneously with the visuals, even a picture of the cat at the beginning. That is reading.

If it seems obvious to you that teaching children to read by showing them the letters as well as the sounds they make, simultaneously, is a good idea… well, hello. [I can’t explain this obvious oversight. Might it have something to do with teachers who become administrators or academics instead of, you know, teaching?]

Apparently, not all teachers recognize that the trees are essential to the forest. How they teach depends on when they went to school and where and their own personal learning styles. As a visual learner this all seems entirely obvious to me, as in duh! [Conversational French in 7th grade was frustrating for me. No one had prepared this reading child for the disconnect I felt when I finally was allowed to see the words “au revoir” in May. I was genuinely shocked at the way the words appeared.

There are ways parents can address this, help with this learning-to-read process. Some children pick up reading because of their own unique skills and the way books are handled in their homes. My mother used flash cards when I was learning to read and we played with words as a game. No one had noticed that my brother could barely read because he was smart enough to [mostly] fake it. Eventually someone did notice, a school councelor, and he was sent to classes at the Evelyn Wood school for Reading Dynamics. His grades abruptly improved. Those special classes were a game changer for him. 

Our younger son, too, struggled, but he was smart enough to fake his way through. Even when he was tested and his reading was “all over the place and made no sense’ he was able to decipher the material and accurately answer questions about the text. The education specialist decided he was fine and let his disability go. Fortunately, his math skills made clear to most teachers that he was not stupid… some children are not so lucky. Reading is so central to evaluating elementary children’s intelligence and educational progress, that children who struggle to read are often assumed to be stupid. They will assume that about themselves. That is tragic.

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EdPsych back at the University of Washington was, like most of my Education classes, mostly a waste of time. The classes were too easy compared to everything else I took as an undergrad. [I completed three undergrad degrees, and the K-12 Art Education degree was ridiculously easy. I was given an A+ on a paper that took me longer to type than to research and draft. I was embarrassed for the prof who gushed over it and have absolutely no memory of what it was about.] One guest speaker at the UW offered useful information about very smart students. Later, when I was teaching English, I took graduate classes for my Standard Certificate in Oregon. Thirty years ago, I created this glossary as a joke for a graduate class in Educational Psychology.

The following terms are found in common use, in the literature, or a need was perceived for their invention.

• abtrudapons unclear (usually intentionally so) response to a question asked in a classroom setting.  The goal is to be so confusing that they might be assumed to actually know the answer. see related terms below.
• abtrudagraphipons unclear drawn or constructed answer to a question.
• abtrudapetrapons unclear written answer to a question.
• abtrudavocapons unclear spoken answer to a question.
• accidiceria sincere regret at the results of one’s actions.  Particularly common when one has been caught.
• affective domain relating to the emotions.
• assessment interpretation of data collected in evaluation.
• austioparalysis predisposition to use audio difficulties as concealment for ignorance as in, “Huh?” (complete austioparalysis) and, “But I thought you told us . . .” (incomplete austioparalysis).
• behavioral objectives simple description of specific behaviors a lesson is designed to accomplish.  Using an action verb, “the student will write…”  see “report language”
• bilbliolaxonomy expansion of bibliography through inclusion of books found in the card catalogue but never actually used as references.  [author’s note: this paper absolutely does not exhibit any signs of bibliolaxonomy.]
• blancotis large areas of knowledge claimed to have been inadvertently mislaid or never learned due to teacher oversight.
• cleptoverbatus inappropriate use of scientific or other specialized term from outside one’s own discipline.
• clockenpitnism the widely held belief that teachers wind down at the end of the school day and are stored overnight in a closet.  believed to be derived from the song title, “Town Without Pity,”
• cognitive domain relating to thought and the thought processes.
• educationalese invented words or borrowed scientific terminology used to artificially boost the credibility of educators.  see related term “cleptoverbus”.
• evaluation testing
• fixed schedule response relationship between physical needs (food, sleep, etc.) and mood as relates to time and day of the week, such as irritability in the period just prior to lunch.
• geosymatic adjusting one’s behavior, language, and expectations to one’s situation.
• guru googoo a theory or technique propounded by an “expert” who has never, in fact, coped with the problem it is designed to solve.
• inappropriate categorical ejaculation answering a question other than the one asked.  Particularly irritating when the answer is incorrect for both the question asked and the one addressed.
• inquiry approach to learning or teaching style based a research model.
• incognito ergo somewhat (literally–in disguise, therefor ambiguous) poor handwriting used to conceal ignorance.  see related term “austioparalysis”.
• manipulitis teacher internalization of student apathy and hostility.
• mentorifaltus blaming the teacher(s) for failure in school, life, and/or relationships. See also “perefaltus”
• morifaltus blaming life for failure in school, life, and/or relationships.
• metamorphosis marked change in appearance, character, condition, or function.  Rarely noted in the classroom.
• metaphysical subjective and objective statements and questions concerning reality, as in “Why do I have to learn (do, know) this?”
• nonparticicutus ploys used by students (and occasionally teachers) to get out of class as in, “I won’t be in today as I have a cold” (primus nonparticicutus) and “I have to call my mother because she forgot…” or “I left my notebook in my locker…” (secundus nonparticicutus).
• obtuse cognitive response (thinking around corners)
• opinion persuasion
• paradigm personal view or specific set of biases, prejudices, and structures defining a particular type of organization or activity. 
• perefaltus blaming the parent(s) for failure in school, life, or relationships.
• persuasion opinion
• pornologic typical response to any written or verbal expression containing words such as “ejaculation, hump, bone, stiff” or describing body parts.
• poromeus the “woe is me” syndrome for both educators and students which interferes with engagement in education.
• postaccidiphobia the consequences of procrastination.  see related term “accidiceria”.
• psychoincognito response lying, particularly when concealing errors or a failure to meet responsibilities.
• psycholinguistics the personal relationship between language and meaning.
• psychomentoritis teacher stress brought on by particularly irritating student questions such as “Is this going to be on the test?”  “Did we do anything in class yesterday?”  “Do we need to take notes?”  “What do you want us to know?”  “How many pages does it have to be?”  “Are you in a bad mood?”
• psychometamotor thinking about action, such as when a student is asked to do something.
• psychomotor relationship between thought and action or movement.
• regurgitation required form of evaluation in a “dispensing information” teaching style.
• report feedback of information gained through evaluation and assessment.
• report language limited description of a behavior as a concrete goal.
• research paper selective periodical, journalistic, and volume regurgitation.
• retroedification syndrome the necessity to go back and reteach material repeatedly, usually to the same students.
• scatalogical interpretation of any term relating to bodily functions as referencing excrement.  see related term “pornological.”
• senile dementia a state of confusion in teachers and parents of simple concepts through extensive exposure to educationalese.
• sibilitis anger and distrust arrising from comparison of a students behavior or performance level with a sibling.  
• sibilant motor response sound emitted in response to an announced assignment or deadline and accompanied by abrupt movements of the feet or arms.
• temporal relapse “spacing out”
• variamentum everyone in a classroom moving in a different direction or approaching an assignment from alternate and incompatible directions.
• vocoparentis demands made by the parent or guardian.  Usually related to a problem created by the student but perceived as the responsibility of the school.  see related term “mentorifaltus”.
• “when children invite child abuse” possibly the world’s least felicitous title of a book directed at helping children with problems to succeed in life.
• zenophobia fear of everything.

These are not real terms, or they weren’t when I created this list in the 1990s. [I am alarmed that only two of these invented terms immediately appeared with that warning red scribble underneath indicating that they are misspellings. Though if I click on some of them, my computer seems to notice.] I was having fun at the time, but I was also more than a little annoyed by academic relabeling of common sense ideas and the relabeling/disguising of things by use of fancier terms. [Two years of high school Latin helped.] Inventing fancy terms seems to be what some academics do best.

In the many, many inservice workshops and classes and presentations I have attended over my 40-year career as a teacher, only one was by an academic who respected teaching children enough that she continued to do it while a tenured professor. Let me say that again: She was taught one class a year of middle school while a professor in Texas and then Yale. She was the one who urged us to admit to our students that reading is hard. “Everyone struggles,” she said. “It’s okay to struggle.” She struggles to read the instructions when completing her tax forms and to read Toni Morrison. Students are afraid to struggle—make clear that struggling is what we all do when we approach something new and complicated. “Admit that it’s hard, admit you struggle too.” The struggle is worth it.