Get a load of this absurdity in Massachusetts…

To soothe the bruised egos of educators and children in lackluster schools, Massachusetts officials are now pushing for kinder, gentler euphemisms for failure.

more stories like thisInstead of calling these schools “underperforming,” the Board of Education is considering labeling them as “Commonwealth priority,” to avoid poisoning teacher and student morale.

Schools in the direst straits, now known as “chronically underperforming,” would get the more urgent but still vague label of “priority one.”

Amazingly, the only student on the board is the sole member with a lick of common sense.

Zachary Tsetsos, a senior at Oxford High School and the only student on the board, said he finds the debate frivolous.

“Why are we spending time on this?,” said the 17-year-old. “I don’t want to tiptoe around the issue. I’m not concerned about what title we give these schools. Let’s work on fixing them.”

Where my wife taught in Maryland they didn’t give “F’s” to kids who failed; they gave them “E’s.”  I’ve heard of teachers who spurn red ink in favor of green because they are afraid copious red ink will hurt the feelings of dummies intellectually challenged pupils.  Idiot used to be a medically accepted term to describe a person who suffered from “profound mental retardation.”

Face it, some words acquire negative connotations in the general vernacular over time due to what the word describes.  Failure itself isn’t a bad word, but some view it as bad because no one wants to be labeled a failure because they’ve seen all the losers who have borne that unfortunate descriptor.  But whether you’re called a failure or a special project or a Munson eventually the name you are given will come to represent what you really are: a loser.  We can endlessly cycle through words or ink colors, but the underlying facts remain.  Those schools in Massachusetts still suck and kids who get E’s or F’s are still going to be serving up fries for a living.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 8:30 pm and is filed under Education, Idiots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.