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Here is my most painful cliche, add your own.
As a teacher I had to listen to this crap for decades. Politicians and educational consultants (i.e. salesmen for the latest educational fad) constantly use this phrase to push the idea that by raising expectations for all students, student performance will universally improve.
As a long-time high jumper I cringed everytime I heard a speaker tout "raising the bar" for everyone. I spent a considerable portion of my life trying to clear high jump bars that had been raised, well aware that the reason to keep raising the bar was to ELIMINATE people. And that the process would continue until utlimately there was only one person left and everyone else had reached some inferior limit!!!
I was never in a competition where everyone cleared every height., so the cliche never made any sense to me. I'd look around in dismay watching school administrators nodding in agreement.... YES, raise the bar and everyone will jump over it!. I always wondered what universe these people lived in and why it was so different from mine.
Sure, I always had high standards for my students and athletes (we owe that to ourselves and to others), but the way it turned out they all eventually separated out based on their personal intellectual and physical capabilities that seemed have little or no relation to my expectations for them! I guess I could have assumed all my students were above average and trained all my runners like they were Jim Ryun, but then the same folks who spouted the "raising the bar" nonsense would have tried to run me out of town!
RAISING THE BAR...
As a long-time high jumper I cringed everytime I heard a speaker tout "raising the bar" for everyone. I spent a considerable portion of my life trying to clear high jump bars that had been raised, well aware that the reason to keep raising the bar was to ELIMINATE people. And that the process would continue until utlimately there was only one person left and everyone else had reached some inferior limit!!!
I was never in a competition where everyone cleared every height., so the cliche never made any sense to me. I'd look around in dismay watching school administrators nodding in agreement.... YES, raise the bar and everyone will jump over it!. I always wondered what universe these people lived in and why it was so different from mine.
Sure, I always had high standards for my students and athletes (we owe that to ourselves and to others), but the way it turned out they all eventually separated out based on their personal intellectual and physical capabilities that seemed have little or no relation to my expectations for them! I guess I could have assumed all my students were above average and trained all my runners like they were Jim Ryun, but then the same folks who spouted the "raising the bar" nonsense would have tried to run me out of town!
It's sort of my pet peeve however when I'm asked "is that new". I mean really, can you give a compliment without wondering if what I'm wearing is new or not? Why does that matter? When I give compliments to my co-workers or anyone on what they are wearing, I don't inquire if it's new, I just give a compliment and leave it at that :wink:
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