I’m
a soft-spoken person.
I
have even been called a low speaker, to the effect that people don’t
hear me. In fact, several times a day, I will be behind someone who
suddenly turns around, throws her hand to her chest, and says: “Oh
my God! You scared me!” Sometimes I'm just walking into the room.
It could be a teacher or a student. I’m really not trying to sneak
up on anyone, so maybe I’m scary, too.
Perhaps that’s why I like to write. No one hears what I say, but they
should be able to read what I write, right? Or so I thought. Here's what happened:
Our
county automatically adds a line below our signature. So if
you work in my school system, you have the following under every
email:
After
the first week of school we had an ESOL Team meeting, during which we
learned that English to Speakers of Other Languages would now be
called ELA, English Language Acquisition. And ELL’s (English
Language Learners) were now called EL’s (English Learners). Never
mind that all of our official, government-mandated documents still
say ESOL and ELL.
I
recalled my time in grad school when I had to learn all of these
different acronyms. And then the past six years when I’ve told
someone I’m an ESOL teacher and he/she’s replied: “Oh! You mean
ESL?”
So
I changed my signature to include this message.
 |
| by the way, these are all official ESOL acronyms |
The
thing is that I changed my signature at
the beginning of September!
Nobody noticed. I've been really sad about it, but I decided I wouldn't tell
everyone – that’s part of what makes it funny! It’s just there,
slyly underneath every communication I send out.
Finally,
FINALLY, someone did notice. The prize goes to Sonja Norwood, our new
ELA specialist! (though if you met her in July, she had the very
different title of ESOL specialist)
Thank
you for the recognition, Sonja!
For
everyone else, sorry if that snuck up on you.
