B. Dowdy, Delpit and M. Obama
Let’s face it growing up in the south we can all relate to how our speech patterns and dialect predetermine a person, you speak slowly therefore you are slow. My daughter recently took a trip to visit family in Indianapolis, Indian. She was excited spend time with her cousin that is the same age, 16. While she was there she was introduced to lots of other teenagers at parties and other events. They liked her southern drawl and she was asked repeatedly to say certain phrases. She was asked if she knew Paula Dean and Andy Griffith. They wanted to know if she rode a tractor to school or if she had to walk. At first it was funny to Emma and a way into a new group of friends, but soon enough she was being mimicked in a way that did not flatter the south. In Emma’s words, “They certainly made southerners sound stupid.”
Now what makes this story so ironic is that Emma was telling me this story using an accent from Indiana and for several weeks after returning from this trip you would have thought that Indiana was the end all be all. So it took one week of “living” there for her to feel that where she was from wasn’t quite good enough. She had bought into what they were selling that they were more intelligent than she was because of an accent. One other funny note is that when Lauren comes to visit us she leaves with a very pronounced southern fried accent.
I enjoyed each of the articles in a different way. I started by watching the video and reading the article about the First Lady, Michelle Obama. She is so elegant and refined to compare her to the average speaker is insulting. Although the population at large may enjoy this I can see how group of young peers may call into question whether she thinks she is above the crowd. So does Michelle have the ability to “code switch” like the students’ in Delpit’s article? Is what we hear her true language of the home?
I was intrigued by what Delpit’s shared about Ebonics and the way it was intended to be a tool to help classroom teachers. I had heard lots about the push early on in my teaching career but never what I read in this article. It made complete sense and it’s ashamed that this push was so misdirected. I loved her idea of adjusting the presentation of curriculum to meet the interests of the students. I had to go and visit the websites she mentioned and they were very interesting. I think an interest inventory at the beginning of the year would be a wonderful way to make sure that what you are teaching in the classroom can be linked to something of interest in the real world.
Dowdy was faced with the same issue that young people face all around the world. Do I fit in with my peers or do what my parents tell me to do for upward mobility? For some it is language for other’s it is how we dress, style our hair, or who we associate with. It is ultimately hiding a part of who we are so that we can be accepted by the masses. Dowdy’s statement on page 9 of the article sums it all up, “I think that I survived my high school years by assuming the best mask ever fabricated: the mask of language. I invented a character who wanted to please her teachers and her dead mother”
Candy Mooney
Comments (3)
I can totally relate to your personal story from a trip to Indiana. I have experienced this from a friend in college. She attended a different University than I did..Upon socializing, dating, and graduating college, she has now completely lost her "southern accent". If you did not know her personally you would know know that she was a girl from a little town called, Lenoir, NC. She felt that she had to change who she was to fit in with the professional crowd. I have also had contact with a person who was denied a job because of her souther accent. The "code switching" is something that we do have to come accustomed to, but have to also become comfortable with who we are in our own dialect. This is something that all of us have had to try out and find where we "fit in". Teachers should make students feel comfortable with their dialects, but also help them to understand the appropriate times to "switch".
Posted by Angela Steele | June 6, 2010 7:44 PM
Posted on June 6, 2010 19:44
I can totally relate to your daughter and her travels north. Both my parents were raised in PA and came to North Carolina 37 years ago, and I was born and raised in NC. They still speak with a northern accent, a little faster than me, but not quite as fast as my relatives still living in PA. I speak slower and often when I visit I feel as if people are making fun of me when they slow their speech, call me their Southern Belle and ask me to say certain things multiple times. It’s frustrating, because I don’t really hear accents that much, and it bothers me that people take it to the extreme. I often watch the movie Sweet Home Alabama because it proves the point that, “Just because I talk slow, don’t mean I’m stupid,” one famous line from the movie. It’s true for everyone, just because we talk different, dress different, or act different doesn’t mean we are dumb, superior, or better than someone else. I know good and well I am smart, but not car smart. I can’t take a engine apart, but a mechanic can, and the mechanic I go to when something is wrong with my car may have not graduated with honors and is not book smart and can’t teach a child how to read, but he’s not dumb. Everyone is smart in different ways, and it’s going to take a lot to get the world to see that.
Meredith Bromley
Posted by Meredith Bromley | June 6, 2010 7:46 PM
Posted on June 6, 2010 19:46
I can relate to what you're saying. When I was growing up, one of my cousins who lived in California would come to visit the extended family here in North Carolina. Those of us who would hang out with her always got a kick out of hearing her say certain words and she certainly reciprocated by making fun of the way we would say certain things, like "I'm fixin' to go to town. You wanna go?" By the end of the summer, we would have all picked up certain words and pronunciations from one another. Upon returning to school, it was then our classmates' turn to make fun of us for not talking like we were from the South. You couldn't win!
Clyde Rice
Posted by Clyde Rice | June 7, 2010 7:23 AM
Posted on June 7, 2010 07:23