Topical Teaching

I am not a big fan of bans in schools, but I love the push for teaching children to use a winder vocabulary:

Children at a school in Mosman have been told not to use the word awesome by a teacher who is trying to broaden her students’ vocabularies.

The word has had a recent resurgence in popularity after last year’s release of The Lego Movie and it’s hit song, Everything is Awesome.

But now a Year 3 teacher at Mosman Public School is asking pupils to try to come up with alternative words such as fantastic or wonderful.

While the Education Department would not confirm if the word had been banned or simply discouraged, one parent wrote on social media: “What an awesome idea, our teacher has banned students saying awesome in class so they expand their vocabulary.”

While the teacher was ­unavailable to comment, Year 3 pupil Claire Davis said the children were told to use alternate words such as fantastic.

“I don’t really say awesome, but the teacher said it doesn’t really mean anything and to use words like fantastic and stuff,” Claire said. “If you use it you may get a bit in trouble. I guess kids use it a lot.”

While some parents loved the idea, others didn’t agree.

“Awesome is such a good Aussie word. What’s wrong with it?” one parent told The Saturday Telegraph.

Education expert Karen Malone said it wasn’t ideal for words to be banned.

“Awesome is a good word. If my class were saying everything they were doing was awesome I’d be pretty happy. Normally, it’s ‘this is boring’.”

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Tags: banning the word awesome, Mosman Public School, school in Mosman ban word awesome

This entry was posted on February 22, 2015 at 12:22 am and is filed under School Rules. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.