Talking Shop

Today I attended a workshop with all of the other elementary student teachers at EMU. I don't know the quantity of people, but enough to fill a ballroom. It was good to have the day off from school (even though I had to get up even earlier!), and it was good to see familiar faces that I haven't seen in a long time.

In the opening session, the woman who is charge of the student teacher program started her talk by saying that there's a change in all of us from where we were in March. March was when we had our first meeting together as a group. We were students then, she said, and now we are professionals. While this was true for about 75% of the people there, it was not altogether true for about 25% of us, including myself. I was still a student attending classes in March, yes, but this also isn't my first professional experience, or first rodeo, so to speak.

She went on to say that now we even talk differently. We're now talking about teaching things, using teacher lingo. How true that is. As I talked to my friends Jen and John before the session began, I found myself talking and asking questions about teaching stuff, using all the appropriate words. "Are you using a balanced literacy approach? What kind of math curriculum are you using? Do you do guided reading? Are you using a basal?" All of this talk would've been like Greek to me only two years ago. Yet now, it's the talk I use all day, every day. In fact, sometimes when I'm talking to Stein, I slip in some jargon and he gives me a quizzical look. Oh yeah, I think, that's not the vernacular of the people. It's the vernacular of teachers.

It got me thinking, then, about the "shop talk" that I've known at different times in my working life. When I worked at the SCUBA diving manufacturer, I knew all about BC's (buoyancy compensators), regs (regulators), fins (NEVER flippers), masks (NEVER goggles), tanks, SKUs, and DEMA (Dive Equipment Manufacturer's Association). Working for the dental product manufacturer, I was introduced to all kinds of products that I saw in the dentist's office but never knew their names: alginate (that paste to make impressions), resin acrylic (for temp crowns), and trays (for the impression goop). One of my favorite jobs was working for Best's Kosher hot dogs and learning the difference between pastrami and corned beef and all their different "cuts", Kosher dogs, salami and bologna vs. regular dogs, salami and bologna, and a whole host of interesting Yiddish words and phrases. At Einstein's I learned about people who were DMs, GMs, SMs, and RVPs, I performed QSCs on all the restaurants in my territory, and was called an OC (no, not the TV show, but an Operations Consultant).

As I started at each place, I was intimidated by all the lingo when attending a meeting where the lingo was flying. But eventually I was the one rattling off the lingo like an expert. Two years ago, when a teacher talked about balanced literacy, guided reading, and other teacher terms, I was also intimidated. And now, I wouldn't say that I'm an expert rattling off the lingo, but I'm an apprentice rattling off the lingo. I know I'm on my way.