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Words I am having to learn or redefine in my job so far:

Rubric: I had vaguely understood it to mean “purview of” but it’s actually closer to this definition:
“a scoring guide for evaluating the quality of work or products to answer the question: What does mastery, and varying degrees of mastery, look like? Has three essential features: evaluative criteria, quality definitions, and a scoring strategy, which may be either holistic or analytic.”

But at least my guessed-at definition was not completely off; according to this, it sometimes means something similar: “Rubrics are the instructions that form chapter headings or titles that are not a part of the text. The word rubric is derived from the Latin word, rubrica, which means “red” because the color of the ink used to write rubrics was red.”

How educational academics got from “chapter heading” to “scoring guide” I have no idea.

Objective: (in education, it’s not a synonym for “goal” but a highly complex three-part process).

And while I am learning, I also spend a bit of time flailing. There are lots of acronyms and internal program names that I don’t know yet. So various conversations end up being something like “I need you to revise the scheidenflugle using the cratsken, and check it for any similarities to our lumpenshin guidelines.”

And then I nod, and my head explodes.

It will all clear up, I know, before long. They hired me for my organization and publishing skills, not my educational background. Still, I wish I knew how to parley-voo more of their francois, por favor.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006 at 10:17 pm and is filed under Latest Bite. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.