Musings from a Not-So-Master Teacher

For the current unit relating to Civil Rights, students have to choose four of the ten homework options.  I deliberately use academic language and a higher vocabulary so that they can grow accustomed to the "grown up world" and because academic language is such a buzzword lately that doing so will keep the curriculum specialists happy for awhile (and I'll have a free ticket to actually teach how I want). 

Yet, it turns out that words like "analyze" or "depict" are not the ones students misunderstand.  Instead, what I find is that we are speaking two completely different languages in seemingly everyday speech. For example, last night, I log into my gmail and there are ten messages. 

The first message read, "I have been analyzing bulletin boards, but I'm not sure what you are talking about when you say 'how are the papers organized and what does that say about their view of authority?'  There are no papers on myspace." 

The next one reads, "How do I do a complete write-up for a video?  Every video is like three minutes or less."  Apparently, "video" conjures up YouTube in her mind, while the word I referred to is a DVD or a movie.  Glad I didn't choose my grandpa's term of "motion picture."  Another e-mail reads, "How long do you want me to watch the news for?  It seems like it doesn't stop."  After a few follow-up e-mails, I realize that he turned on CNN and then Fox. 

These e-mails are from my Honors group.  They are not failing to use common sense.  It's simply that we come from two different worlds.  They are the digital natives and I'm a digital immigrant - albeit an early one who integrated (and even perhaps assimilated) early in life.  What I realize is that in many ways, I am using false cognates, assuming that a word in "my" language means the same as their language.  Yet, what I can see now is that, even though I am the teacher, in technology, I am somewhat of an ELL student.