"at" at the end of a where phrase

[J. Eulenberg]

Thanks for your letter, Pattii.  Good points all around from the others.
The interesting thing is that despite all the corrections, I don't think
any of the students in the class felt ashamed.  So there was something in
the way she said it, the way she corrected what we wrote, and the way she
encouraged us to write.  I don't know what it was, but I've at least
carried on some of it in the classroom myself.  I don't correct spoken
dialect, but I certainly did correct written papers for both content and
"English."  And I had the blessing of the head of the history dept for
doing so.

Julia Niebuhr Eulenberg <eulenbrg at u.washington.edu>

On Sun, 7 Dec 2003, Patti Kurtz wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Patti Kurtz <kurtpatt4 at NETSCAPE.NET>
> Subject:      Re: "at" at the end of a where phrase
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> write at SCN.ORG wrote:
>
> >I teach 8th grade.  This thread makes me feel as if I should never correct
> >my students writing.
> >
> Okay, I'm not a linguist per se, but an English prof, but my feelings
> are that a9 it's okay to show students what's expected in "Standard
> written English" as long as we don't disparage their own dialects in the
> process.  Students can learn to style shift very readily-- the problem,
> I think, that Dennis and the others are focusing on is the view that one
> dialect (the mythical standard) is somehow "better" than the others.
> Plus speech and writing are very different-- we speak (as a rule) much
> more informally than we write.  And a lot of writing has to do with
> audience.  What are the students writing to who? (or should that be
> whom?)  Anyhow, I think as a teacher, it's important to teach the
> conventions of written standard English, but to do so in a  way that
> doesn't make students ashamed of the way they talk.  Students should
> also realize that there may be a time or place in writing for dialect
> and casual usage-- such as e mails, letters to friends, fiction, etc.
> The key I think is in not labeling variants as "bad English" but as
> variants which may not be accepted by the academic community.
>
> Okay, that's  my 2 cents.
>
> Patti Kurtz
> English Department
> Minot State University
> Minot, ND
>
> > No doubt, I will think something is wrong that
> >really isn't, or is so common that I should just ignore it.  Where is
> >there help for teachers who were never trained about language themselves?
> >Jan
> >
> >
>
> --
>
> If  you write nothing, nothing is what you end up with!
>
>
>
> Joseph Bruchac
>