If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance ...

Most of us would like to find a tool to eliminate education jargon,  but if you feel a need to lay it on thick,  here's an amusing tool from ScienceGeek.net to "amaze your colleagues with finely crafted phrases of educational nonsense."

USA Today's Greg Toppo passed this gem along to the Education Writers Association listserve,  where it's getting chuckles.  My randomly generated sentence:  "We will synergize mastery-focused paradigms with synergistic effects."

The jargon generator's unsigned introduction suggests the tool will be useful for writing grant applications,  reports and other documents related to public schools.  It says the author was inspired by this sentence from the College Board's AP chemistry framework:  "The student can connect phenomena and models across spatial and temporal scales."

I got a kick out of seeing  "21st century learners"  among the options.  Not long ago,  a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools educator told me how tired she was of hearing that label.  She's right:  In the 1990s it had a futuristic feel,  and even for the first year or two of the 21st century it had some edge.   But 13 years in?  Lame.  Kind of like  "thinking outside the box"  --  the irony of a cliche used to describe original thinking.