The intimidation of the secret language.

I was in a series of interviews today and as the hours slipped by I had some thoughts.

I recalled some of the IEPs I sat in on over the years. We would talk about goals, progress, and percentages. While most of it made sense to me I am positive some of the parents had no idea what we were talking about.

I’m sure some were silent because they didn’t want to look foolish by asking.

My first years in the classroom was kinda like that, it was like everyone was speaking a language I really didn’t fully understand. There were times I just nodded my head and pretended to know.

Years before that I was immersed in a different culture with their own language. We used acronyms for everything for the food we ate to the activities that filled our days and nights. An outsider coming in would be somewhat lost and confused. A field day is when we cleaned for hours, a police call was picking up trash and being secure meant time off. these are some quick examples of our odd language.

Today we interviewed a few firms who applied during our RFQ process. I’m not entirely sure but I think it was Request For Quote. These things have their own set of rules that you have to follow to give everyone the same exact information without any variation.

These firms came in and talked with use for 45 minutes. They used short abbreviations for their qualifications and processes they used. I was a bit lost and there wasn’t a ton of time to go deep into what these things meant. While these things might not have been super important it had me thinking.

My take away is that I need to create a sheet or a site that I can share when embarking on something new. Maybe it should be for Canvas, as that is new to most of us, or anything that we are venturing into that might be unfamiliar to the people we are working with.