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> The professional educator dialect of English is not very approachable for the layman. I think Dan's blog is largely pitched at other professional educators.

> The professional educator dialect of English is not very approachable for the layman. I think Dan's blog is largely pitched at other professional educators. All professions develop their own technical vocabulary. As an analogy, I recently enjoyed an article about the implementation of the v8 garbage collector by Jay Conrod: http://jayconrod.com/posts/55/a-tour-of-v8-garbage-collection http://jayconrod.com/posts/55/a-tour-of-v8-garbage-collectio... Here's a sample paragraph: "Distinguishing pointers and data on the heap is the first problem any garbage collector needs to solve. The GC needs to follow pointers in order to discover live objects. Most garbage collection algorithms can migrate objects from one part of memory to another (to reduce fragmentation and increase locality), so we also need to be able to rewrite pointers without disturbing plain old data." I think the article is an excellent piece of technical writing, but it would also be reasonable to say "the professional compiler engineer dialect of English is not very approachable to the layman." That said, good communicators need to be able to change their presentation based on the audience, and it's too bad that the people at the meeting you mention couldn't find a common vocabulary. If you want to see something by the author of this post that is pitched at the layman, he made a very nice TedX presentation a few years ago: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover?language=en#t-202117 http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_meyer_math_curriculum_makeover?...

Spooky23 12y ago
Agreed. I've found that a lot of education officials hide behind that jargon, that's all. Totally get the domain specific jargon. I've seen my wife glaze in about 30s when I start muttering about tech stuff!
WalterBright 12y ago
> "the professional compiler engineer dialect of English is not very approachable to the layman." We compiler guys do that on purpose in order to keep our salaries high!
VLM 12y ago
One sophistry problem is we will "ALL" theoretically take and pass Algebra, so the teacher does not have the luxury of specialized jargon, the teacher MUST be able to present it to the entire general public. A general education teacher is expected to present effectively to the general public as the core of their job, its not a nice to have or wouldn't it be interesting if it were possible. On the other hand, only maybe 1% of the population has to suffer thru garbage collector theory in CS classes, and of that 1%, maybe only 0.0001% ever implement a GC "in the real world" and can understand that post. There just aren't that many GC programmers and there are a lot of humans in the general public. In that case jargon is perfectly acceptable, even expected. Also the core of a programmers job is rarely making public presentations.
- jwmerrill 12y ago
  I didn't mean that teachers get a pass on opaque vocabulary when they're teaching students. I meant that, just like every other profession, they have a technical vocabulary that they use to discuss their own profession with other teachers.

Spooky23 12y ago

Agreed. I've found that a lot of education officials hide behind that jargon, that's all. Totally get the domain specific jargon. I've seen my wife glaze in about 30s when I start muttering about tech stuff!

WalterBright 12y ago

> "the professional compiler engineer dialect of English is not very approachable to the layman." We compiler guys do that on purpose in order to keep our salaries high!

VLM 12y ago

One sophistry problem is we will "ALL" theoretically take and pass Algebra, so the teacher does not have the luxury of specialized jargon, the teacher MUST be able to present it to the entire general public. A general education teacher is expected to present effectively to the general public as the core of their job, its not a nice to have or wouldn't it be interesting if it were possible. On the other hand, only maybe 1% of the population has to suffer thru garbage collector theory in CS classes, and of that 1%, maybe only 0.0001% ever implement a GC "in the real world" and can understand that post. There just aren't that many GC programmers and there are a lot of humans in the general public. In that case jargon is perfectly acceptable, even expected. Also the core of a programmers job is rarely making public presentations.

jwmerrill 12y ago
I didn't mean that teachers get a pass on opaque vocabulary when they're teaching students. I meant that, just like every other profession, they have a technical vocabulary that they use to discuss their own profession with other teachers.