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As a teacher, one of my promises is to take full responsibility for my words. This means that any question about anything I say at the level of “what do you mean when you say X?” deserves an honest answer. If I cannot respond to that question, I do not belong in the classroom.
I mean this. If I ever find myself teaching through a smoke screen of words I am not accountable to, then I ought to leave the profession entirely and do something else.
This doesn’t mean that my words and their intended meanings are always true or right, but I should never try to be untrue or wrong on purpose and when I submit them to scrutiny I should be able to revise them without leaving myself entirely free from responsibility for them.
I fear that students often use their words based on the poor examples of academics throwing terms around willy nilly and seeing *that* as what being smart looks like.
