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super late post #3 becuase I thought I did post..whoops
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Hey guys,
Yep, I did forget to post this week, but better late than never. I decided to write my post in Spanish becuase I was inspired by Noa's Arc. In it the author suggests encouraging children to write journal entries in their native language, so I said, why not. I decided to write about my paper as a way to think through my in school example. In it I give reasons why a student, no matter how brilliant, social and outgoing, would not fit in at my school becuase of the way he speaks. I was thinking of a young man I had been introduced to by Brown University's presentation on their "Hip-Hop Scholarship" aimed at diversifying their student body. The guys was obviously smarter than me but he spoke in a way that would make him seem uneducated and so I wondered if he would be accepted into my school because of his academic carrer, but either fail the interview or not feel welcome at my school because of where he comes from and how much that effects his speech. I concluded not. Everyone here speaks in the same tone, within one standard deviation of the same word choice and style, and he's at about three standard deviations away from us, so I don't think my school would be good for him which is unfortunate because how many brilliant minds is my school missing out on because of this. Should he change becuase of his speech is holding him back? Is it? I'm not sure about any of this but it made for an interesting discussion in my essay.
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Comments
This post reminds me of
This post reminds me of exactly what we were talking about in class today (2/19). We talked about the excerpt from Leslie's Literacy Autobiography in which she submitted her paper and had the dialogue in the language (slang) that she and her friends typically spoke in, rather than "perfect English." This idea of the way someone speaks dictating their level of intelligence is very frustrating to me, mostly because I have no idea what to do about it. This also brings me back to the June Jordan article about learning "black English" in school versus "proper English." I agree with you that it is difficult to come up with one answer about how to make this right. I suppose in a perfect world there would be a perfect balance. But it is obvious that this is not so.