Moms' Talk Q&A: A DBQ, By Any Other Name ....

For the love of phonemes!

It’s back to school time again, which, for parents means that we run the risk of being confronted with jargon. That may go down well in the fine teaching academies of our country, but only raises question marks when you’re trying to understand what your children are doing in school. (A tip of the hat to Rich Zahradnik, inspired this one.)

It was only last year that I learned what a phoneme was. Per the dictionary, for the, um, uneducated, a phoneme is: “the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language.” No, wait, here’s a better explanation: A phoneme is: “the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.”

I think I’ll just go with the Greek, which describes it as , “a sound uttered.” That’s better.

But the same goes for other jargon that is second nature to some, and, well, Greek to others. I was long mystified by my son occasionally telling me that he had to work on a DBQ. A DBQ, you ask? Why, it’s a data-based question -- or what we used to call an essay question. (I think.) A teacher asks you to write an essay about something based on actual documents surrounding it. Could be the battle of Gettysburg, or Darwin’s theory of evolution. But, apparently, calling it by its old name wasn’t enough, and so a DBQ it is.

And then there’s the rubric. Every time I hear the word, I picture a Rubik’s Cube, but that, of course, is wrong. Here’s a use of the word that I found on a Web site about, as luck would have it, “How to Write a DBQ”: “A DBQ essay question will always be accompanied by a grading rubric which explains how the essay response will be graded." 

Good to know! Seriously though, what is a rubric?  According to a -- perish the thought -- “rubrics expert” I found on the Internet, it’s “a scoring tool that lists the criteria for a piece of work or 'what counts.'" Call me crazy, but I think it’s what is otherwise known as a list, or to get a little sharper with the definition, a list of criteria.

I’ll save you the pain of what the term decoding means in an educational context, except to say that If your kid is good at what we used to call sounding out words, you don’t need to know.

So, as this is Moms’ Talk Q&A, here’s today’s challenge: What terminology from your kids’ schools totally throws you?