When and where: My sister got married on Oct. 5, so I spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Geneva with our new combined families. My family has a general lack of love for "fancy" vocabulary. Apparently the Canadians believe that it is too ostentatious to flaunt ones knowledge. And my new brother-in-law's family is from Sodus, which has low education stereotypes galore. I got into a conversation with my sister's mother-in-law who ranted on about how the Common Core is making teachers teach math differently than how she learned it. She told me that she told it should be the teacher's pejorative to teach however they wanted. At this point I was done with the conversation and claimed I just remembered something I left... somewhere.
Level of familiarity: I am very familiar with the word "prerogative" which is what I believe this woman meant to say. However, I had no idea if pejorative was even a real word. I spent some time poking around Google and experimenting with spellings and it turns out that pejorative is in fact an actual word.
What it means: Merriam Webster defines pejorative as an adjective that describes something with negative connotations, so a word or a situation could be pejorative. It seems to denote a belittling word or criticism specifically. *sings* "And seldom is heard, a pejorative word". In fact I might come up with some pejorative words to insult her misuse of the word.
Reflective commentary: I really like that pejorative is a word used to describe other words. I can see myself using this word with students: instead of saying "That's not a nice word" which makes me feel like I'm five or they're five, I could say, "That was a pejorative word and I will not allow that in my classroom". Awesome.
Also, I would like to add that my sister's mother-in-law had some pejorative words to say about the Common Core. Most of which was ill-informed.
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