Reply to Does your preschool/pre-K teacher speak using correct grammar?

Forum Index » Schools and Education General Discussion

Reply to "Does your preschool/pre-K teacher speak using correct grammar?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Oh jeez.  I went to DCPS (one of those "JKLM" schools) and some of the teachers and aides didn't always speak 100% grammatically correct English and often spoke with a black dialect.  I got a great education there.  I am white and upper middle class, and I speak the way my parents speak; I did when I was elementary school age as well.  My peers also spoke the way their parents spoke--i.e. generally grammatically correctly.  I also read a lot of books--like Tom Sawyer--that were written at least partially in dialect, and I got that people from various backgrounds spoke differently.

Children internalize pretty early on that people perceive you differently if you speak differently, and being white and speaking as if you are white confers advantage socially and academically.  I internalized this before I could intellectually comprehend what was going on--if this makes you feel better. It also taught me that people speak differently when they have different cultural backgrounds, and you shouldn't make assumptions about people's intelligence by how they speak.  DC has long been a city with a large African American population, and African American vernacular is spoken all over this city--unless you want your kid to live in a bubble, they will encounter black people with black speech patterns, who, yes, are in positions of authority.

I would actually say that after I moved from DC, I realized that I had no issues understanding "black" English the way a lot of upper middle class white people seem to, and I think this is generally a good thing.  So I really wouldn't freak out too much about a few "ain'ts" and dropping the "to be" verb in sentences.  It does come off as racist, classist, and petty.[/quote]
WTF IS A BLACK DIALECT?
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics