RES 5535: Race, Class, and Gender in Literacy Research (summer 2010)

The first article speaks to a truth that we as teachers try so very hard to ignore: to get what we want out of children, we are often asking them to publicly poop themselves a little.
In the “Ovuh Dyuh” article, the costs of social affirmation, of this young girl, through learning the language of the colonizer was isolation from her people, but it helped her in school and in the society as a whole. This lead to a successful career with many other fringe benefits along the way, yet was as destructive socially as pooping yourself in the middle of class.
This is something I see every day in my classes. For example, I have two students from Guatemala, whom speak with great fluency, Standard Written English (SWE), yet find themselves isolated because, as one of my other social gang members informed me when I asked him to let the two, Leo and Jordan, join his group, “Na. They ain’t real Spanish. I can’t understand them; sides man, they ain’t Mexican enough,” coming from a Puerto Rican. Just like when Dowdy was made fun of for her “over there” comment and felt as if “two nations have been developed within her,” these boys represented two nations: the white and the Mexican, even though nationality never played a role in the conversation, just language.

And again, I continue to contend that we, as teachers, strive to force social pooping from children because we validate this kind of social discord because we try to kill “the Spanish or hick” out of our children by not allowing them to speak or write in anything other than the formal, that we, ourselves, do not do, when we are in our own homes. In my classes, I allow a mixture of languages and language styles and incorporate code switching lessons with great results, mostly because of Geny. Geny, was one of my students, and is considered to be the worst student at the school. She is constantly in trouble and will fight at the drop of a hat. So when I found out that she was being transferred to my class, I nearly had a heart attack. At first, there was no change in this associated behavior and we warred daily, until suddenly she stopped being an issue and started being the leader of discussions over literature and writing principals, and the girl that I thought would kill my class and writing test scores, turned out to be the girl with the highest grade average in the class. At the end of the year, I asked her what had changed in her and her response was, “You know those poems I wrote, that you let me write in Spanish, ya know…about the cockroaches biting my feet when we was sleepin’ in the run down house at the border when we first got over here and how my brother died trying to get to NC because we were afraid to go to the doctor cause we ain’t legal.. Well that’s why, because you let me be real. It was real.” She still fights and has a lot of issues, but in English class, she has me and is as different as a Martian child might be.
In Trinidad, the teachers try to kill student’s authentic language, which forces the children to make a choice between their heritage and the language of success, gaining global and monetary triumphs, but losing social abilities from ostrification. Yet in, “No Kind Sense,” we see Mrs. Delpit’ daughter in a world where both her first language SWE and the language she develops from her charter school and uses in social situations, African American Vernacular English (AAVE), are jointly accepted by the dominant leaders of her life, the teachers and her mother, and she develops into excellence as both a learner and a social being through code switching.

Delpit’s fear of the new language, when it first appears is understandable, but her acceptance of it as a part of her child’s identity is admirable and represents the true way that students/children should learn language skills from both parents and teachers. We, as teachers, spend far too much time obsessing over speaking proper English and it destroys our children’s willingness and love for SWE because it is associated with punishments, and to learn children need to want to be like us and not forced into something that they are not use to. For example, a coach can spend hours telling his players that they need to be responsible citizens and help out in the community, with little result, but put in one video clip of Michael Jordan planting a tree for Arbor Day, and every child will be asking for a shovel. We, as humans, only learn from people we respect. I can think of at least three courses in my college career, that I didn’t learn a thing from, just fulfilled the requirements for an “A” and moved on because I had no respect for the professors as they lectured the entire class on things that an armature should know, whilst constantly yelling at us, the students, for grammar mistakes and for thinking outside of the box about their precious literature. Yet, I can’t count the amount of things I have learned in the last year at ASU from professors who could care less about those issues, and loved every moment of out of the box thinking because they were learning too. A teacher at my school, we will call her Carol to save face, taught Biology and had the worst test scores in the school, probably in the country. No one could figure out why she had such awful test scores and why the students hated her so much. One day I noticed that she had 13 rules, with one in giant black letters, NO LANGUAGE OTHER THAN ENGLISH SPOKEN IN CLASS. I asked her about it and she said that she had already written up thirteen children for breaking that rule and could not figure out why the administration kept sending them back to class. I was speechless. Again, because she was forcing SWE on them and because she was mean to them because she did not respect their home language, the children learned nothing from her because, as they often said under their breath, she was a “Punta” in their minds. This shows the only real results of asking children to kill their heritage.

However, within the work, another important facet of this conversation must be taken into consideration with the example of the smart computer technician who could not be taken seriously because of her dialect. This example shows the extreme prejudice our society has on language use and validates our need to teach children SWE for success. Also, the Obamas clip epitomizes this necessity as well because many people would not have voted for someone who spoke Ebonics, even though they lost some creditability with their base voters because they did not seem black enough. When I was a hiring manager at McDonalds, I use to judge my hires based off of their ability to correctly use the language because, at that time, as ashamed as I am to admit it, I too thought that the ability to speak well represented the ability to think well. While that is not my current belief, it is obvious that children need the core values of SWE to be successful. Yet, they do not have to kill their native language and heritage to do so. The Trilinualism article discusses the use of code switching instruction that allows us as teachers to allow our children to have their cake and eat it too, without the embarrassment of pooping themselves in public.

The following example video is one that I often think of when discussing Ebonics, as one of my professors showed it to my class before his lecture on Ebonics. It does have a few cuss words in it, but it is funny, so only watch it if you need a laugh.
Steve Harvey-“Ebonics Dictionary” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klxGFAnY4nI

Post by William Byland