The Latest from VEA

Here are a few words that you may find useful and may want to make part of your professional lingo, courtesy of GCFL.net:

Bookstache:  The facial hair added by students to every portrait in the American history textbook.

Colate:  Two students who arrive tardy to class at the same time.

Corroborative learning:  When all the students in a class agree to stick to the same excuse for why their work is not done.

Digital disorganizers:  Fascinating electronic organizers that distract students from paying attention to assignments, instructions, and due dates.

Erasivot:  The divot that you get in your paper if you erase too hard.

Handoubt:  To wonder if the students even looked at the important papers you just passed out to them.

Hydropendent:  Student who requests permission to get a drink of water every 10 minutes.

Interconversations:  The office conversations you overhear when someone forgets to turn off the intercom after an announcement.

McDone:  Students unable to participate in the afternoon’s learning activities because they consumed large amounts of fast food for lunch.

Meview:  A class review of material in which the only one really reviewing is the teacher.

Multiple unintelligences:  A variety of ways of not knowing something. Includes, but is not limited to: resistive unintelligence, disinterested unintelligence, distracted unintelligence, unconscious unintelligence, and absent unintelligence.

Plausea:  The queasy feeling a teacher gets while trying to figure out if a student’s excuse is believable or not.

Powerpointless:  A wonderfully executed, high tech presentation completely devoid of meaningful content.

Repedementia: Repeatedly telling the same joke to the same class because you can’t remember which of your classes you’ve told it to.

Seatables:  The little pieces of school lunch that hide on the seats of school lunchroom chairs waiting to adhere to the next unsuspecting sitter.

Signotsure:  The signature that comes back on a midterm report that looks more like the student’s than the parent’s.

Strobed:  The feeling you have after spending all day in a classroom with florescent lights that do that flicker thing.

Teacherscreen:  The student who stands in front of you to purposefully block your view of the rest of the class as he asks you a question.

Telesubbies:  Substitute teachers who only show videos.

Torigami:  Assignment papers folded and unfolded so many times that they are turned in as sixteen separate pieces.

Vistamized:  A student so fascinated with the view from the classroom window that he has completely lost touch with what’s going on inside the classroom.

Wired classroom:  Any classroom in which the teacher has had more than five cups of coffee and each student has had more than two cans of Mountain Dew.