beyond the pail

[Kathleen E. Miller]

At 05:51 PM 3/6/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>Today a student in my class mentioned that her children lose points on
>schoolwork because one vocabulary item that keeps coming up on tests and in
>other teaching materials is "pail", and the word the children know,
>"bucket", is marked as wrong. Of course we are all aware that it's been
>established that the educational system's reaction to nonstandard linguistic
>features sometimes doesn't fit the stated goals of testing, but this is the
>first time I've heard of discrimination on the basis of *regional* features.
>Does this happen often? If so, should we (or someone else) try to do
>something about it?
>
>-Mai (in Muncie, IN)


It happened to me, sort of.  I was born in Delaware and lived there for the
first 5 years of my life. We then moved to Indiana where I started grade
school. I flunked an out-loud reading assignment in 3rd grade because I
refused to say crick, instead of creek. That would've been in 1979.

Kathleen E. Miller
Research Assistant to William Safire
The New York Times