* PRAIRIE DOGGING - When someone in Central Office yells (or drops something loudly) in a "cube farm" (an office full of cubicles) and everyone's heads pop up over the walls to see what's going on.

* TOURISTS - Teachers who take inservice training just because it is required or to get a vacation from their classrooms. "We had three serious students in the class; the rest were just tourists."

* TREEWARE - Printed computer software/hardware documentation.

* OHNOSECOND - That minuscule fraction of time in which you realize that you've just made a BIG mistake. (Also known as a CLM, "Career Limiting Move")

* ADMINISPHERE - The organizational layers beginning just above the school principal. Decisions that fall from the adminisphere are often profoundly inappropriate or irrelevant to the problems they were designed to solve.

* DILBERTED - To be exploited and oppressed by the administration. Derived from the experiences of Dilbert, the engineer in the job-from-hell comic strip character. "I've been dilberted again. The old man decided we all needed to be on bus duty every morning and every afternoon."

* SEAGULL MANAGER- A principal or superintendent who flies in, makes a lot of noise, poops on everything, and then leaves.

* SALMON YEAR - The experience of spending an entire year swimming upstream writing new ideas in a committee to implement a new initiative only to be told that the adminisphere has chosen to go with the next new fad instead. "Your input has been valuable, but the project has died. Next year we will begin the Accelerated Schools initiative. Which committee would you like to be on?"

* 404 - Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404 Not Found," meaning that the requested document could not be located. "Don't bother asking him...he's 404, man."

* PERCUSSIVE MAINTENANCE - The fine art of whacking an electronic device *just right* to get it to work again.