beyond the pail

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 01:36 PM 3/7/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>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.

See Matt's follow-up comment, on 'bucket' and 'crick' as perceived
Southernisms.  And yes, "the book" is always right to teachers, and
textbooks usually come out of Northern writers and publishers, right?

> > 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?

We do indeed have to discuss socially "nonstandard" variants as well as
regional ones, I think, while at the same time pointing out the reality of
post-school discrimination if children don't learn how to distinguish style
and register appropriateness.  A faculty member in the English Dept. here
ran a workshop last summer on Appalachian English in literature, and I was
asked to talk about the linguistic features of AE.  Of course I stressed
its acceptability and correctness in general, but some thought that it
would be OK for literary game-playing but not for "real" use
today.  However, one participant said she uses a clothing metaphor in her
h.s. classes--one type of clothes for play and another for work.  I was
criticized for accepting her metaphor when I talked about this at ADS this
year, but I think she's only trying to be honest with her students; we
linguists too often act as if the "real world" doesn't matter when it comes
to language usage issues.  The same goes for AAVE, of course.

>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.

This is REALLY pathetic.

>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

Interestingly, our summer workshop attracted h.s. teachers from all over
the state--Cleveland, Cincinnati, etc.--but none from this hotbed of
town/gown linguistic divisions, Athens.  Spouses of OU faculty often teach
in the local schools, where they regularly talk in the most negative terms
about the hicks and hillbillies of this area.  Sigh.

Beverly Flanigan
Ohio University