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Piggybacking off of this, as an elementary school art teacher I’m kind of baffled by my coworkers’ lack of vocabulary and inferential logic. I’m perturbed by it. Flummoxed even. For real though, I’m a bit of word-nerd. I think since I didn’t learn how to read until I was a teenager, I make a point to not dumb-down my language with kids as much as possible. Nothing is “that’s just what this thing is called” in my class. Oil pastels are called that for a reason, and you’ll understand what oils and waxes are by the time we’re done with this cool ass lava lamp project. I know I don’t have to go that deep in my instruction. I could be a Pinterest board teacher and get by very easily. But kids like knowing content on a deeper level. They eat up words like “tertiary” and “crystalline” and “zygomatic arch” when you give their brains a chance to expand. But I’m also not under any assumption that their homeroom teachers are going to know my content area like I do.

Though there’s something to be said for not understanding more common parlance. A homeroom teacher was picking up their class the other day, and we were making small talk as the students were exiting. I made a comment about a young boy in class who has somewhat of a Bart Simpson disposition. I said something like, “I’m not really a believer in nominative determinism, but with a name like his he’s bound to be a Supreme Court Justice or something.”

We teach children how to use context clues to make inferences. We teach that concept to children. It’s a big deal. Nominative determinism isn’t an everyday term, but even if you’ve never heard of it you can figure it from the context. So there I was after a couple minutes explaining that I don’t actually believe this child is destined to be a Supreme Court justice when the teacher hits me with, “How did you even come up with that?”

Some questions will just kind of grind your brain to halt, like when my mom asked me if net neutrality means they will tax the internet or like my two-year-old asking me if the sky is a type of motor. Maybe I’m not conveying the absurdity here clearly enough. Imagine someone implying that you came up with the phrase “life finds a way” while you’re talking about dinosaurs. I realize they’ve never seen Jurassic Park, so you tell them about it, but they think you’re talking about a real event where scientists actually created dinosaurs that got lose and ate people. That sort of the vibe here with me and that teacher. We’re ostensibly sharing the same reality, but it doesn’t feel like it.