In the past, we’ve already spoken about time-sensitive things that teachers hate to hear at the end of the year but there are some words and phrases that sounds like nails down a chalkboard to every single teacher, all year round. Here’s 5 words that teachers hate to hear…
1 – Banter
Banter – or even worse, bants – is cover for a multitude of sins. Oftentimes, a cop-out excuse for sexist, racist or homophobic comments – or for bullying and intimidating other students.
“Yeah, I punched him in the face but it was just banter, Miss.”
Pure bants equals pure hell. And speaking of homophobic comments…
2 – Gay
What the Oxford Dictionary defines as ‘happy and care-free’ or, latterly, ‘homosexual’, a tribe of boorish, largely adolescent males have contrived to redefine as ‘wrong or bad’, as in “Liam’s staying late for a revision session. That’s so gay.”
We recommend ridding the word of pejorative connotations by reclaiming its original meaning at every opportunity: “It’s such a gay day today! Who else feels gay? Adam, you look particularly gay and cheerful.”
3 – Trawl
The book trawl would be welcome if it involved all those exercise books being propelled into a net and any unwanted ones cast overboard. A fishing trawler is designed for wholesale efficiency whereas book trawls seem designed for small-scale pedantry. Trawl doesn’t even sound better than check; instead, it evokes a nightmarish image of being ensnared and dragged through sludge. Even worse, the alternatively titled book scrutiny sounds like the paper-based equivalent of a smear test!
4 – Target
Having goals is good. We should have targets to aim for. So why does the use of this word in schools make it feel as if the children are being used for target practice and the teachers are carrying great big bullseyes on their backs?
5 – Any teen slang that we’re not down with
See fam, bae, bb, trill, lit or on fleek. See, also, new teaching technology: BYOD has us WTFing more than GOAT. We know that language evolves but we don’t like feeling more anachronistic than analogue TV, CD players or those old chalkboards that we could have scraped to show our displeasure.
Do you have any other trigger words you want to subject us all to?
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