beyond the pail

[Mai Kuha]

On 3/6/03 6:31 PM, Gordon, Matthew J. wrote:

> What's odd about this is why the teachers, who presumably are bucket folk too,
> are not making allowances for the children. (...)

Interesting question! I'm wondering whether some teachers feel so much
linguistic insecurity that they don't dare apply their own intuitions, so
whatever the book says is right and everything else is wrong. For all they
know, maybe "bucket" is yet another item that refined people point and laugh
at.

> I'm sure the teaching standards for the state of Indiana include compentencies
> related to cultural and linguistic differences. I would encourage the parent
> to take it up with the school.

My initial impression was that the parents don't see this as a major issue,
but I'll take it up with her.

> Maybe you, Mai, could do an in-service
> presentation on language variation.

Can a single presentation be effective? I feel that I'm not always
successful in accomplishing the kind of attitudinal learning that we are
alluding to even when I have an entire semester to do it in, in our
undergraduate language & society course. Has anyone else prepared such a
presentation?

Also, I'm wondering what would be a practical way for us (linguists) to send
teachers the message that regional variants should be accepted, in a way
that doesn't imply that we condone other language-related discrimination
currently going on in classrooms. We can distinguish "regional variant" and
"nonstandard variant" as concepts, but sometimes the categories overlap, as
some of the other messages in this thread suggest--right?

And, of course, troubling approaches to language in schools aren't limited
to dialect issues. Not too long ago, a colleague mentioned her son's
frustration at having been forced to memorize a list of all English
prepositions and take an in-class pass-fail test consisting of writing out
all the prepositions in alphabetic order. Cases like this make me think that
an awareness-raising presentation could be very helpful to teachers, but it
would be even better if, in addition, we could offer them linguistically
enlightened teaching materials and resources. I realize we all (or most of
us) have full-time jobs already, so getting this to happen would not be
easy.

-Mai