Like Kryptonite To Stupid
This is so stupid.
Ebonics suggested for district
Incorporating Ebonics into a new school policy that targets black students, the lowest-achieving group in the San Bernardino City Unified School District, may provide students a more well-rounded curriculum, said a local sociologist.
Black students aren’t doing well, so we should use this crappy, broken language to communicate with them. What the hell?
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Oliver Willis
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How much do you want to bet all the people quoted in this article as favoring the move are white?
It sounds to me like the teachers of San Bernadino have just given up on black students and are trying to teach them using slang. Ebonics is not a language, it’s slang English. It’s full of bad grammar, misused words, misspelled words, and I think it’s insulting to the intelligence of blacks everywhere to try to recognize the tripe as a language.
Tillman hoped the new policy would increase the number of black students going to college and participating in advanced courses.
Are you insane, dude? If your kid doesn’t know proper English rules upon graduating from high school, they have no hope in college. None. Trust me, I know this for a fact. I watched too many Asian kids struggle in my major (a technical one) because they didn’t know basic English rules and punctuation and thus couldn’t write legible papers. These kids were smart as hell, but because of the communication barrier were unable to “hack it”.
Giving up on teaching proper English would be a disservice to these children and will hurt San Bernadino in the long run.
Latin. We should be teaching kids Latin. It’s the cultural property of anyone who breathes and its study inexorably leads to a passing knowledge of standard English grammar.
Draw whatever arbitrary distinctions you like. OK, it’s NOT a language. That doesn’t mean kids in low-income, urban neighborhoods don’t speak it. In fact, some speak it exclusively because it’s what they’ve heard and what they’ve been taught.
Now if you want to teach those kids anything, which is better:
1) teach them the same way you teach kids who have been speaking standard English all their lives? Or,
2) teach them in a way that accounts for their different linguistic skills?
If you choose 1), then wouldn’t you apply the same idea to kids who grew up in familes that spoke Spanish at home?
Ebonics is not a language.
Oliver, although I understand (I think) the point you’re making, language is alive and changes constantly.
In Canada there is a dialect called Acadian; it is a strange mixture of French and English words; neither Anglophones nor Francophones understand it. Yet it is very much a part of the culture in certain areas of the country and is in fact taught in some Universities as an offshoot of French.
This argumennt about Ebonics has been around a long time and doesn’t look like it’s going away; acknowledging it may be one way of getting past it.
Down here, mouse, that’s called Cajun.
So?
What difference does that make to the kids who speak it? Why should that matter in how you teach them?
Return to my first comment: I don’t see that in the article you linked. The way I read it, the sociologist is saying you have to teach kids who speak dialect the same way you teach kids who speak a foreign language.
I don’t see anything in the article about teaching, writing, or speaking Ebonics. What I do see is a strategy for helping kids who aren’t fluent in standard English to learn what they need.
I read it differently. The lone sociologist quoted in the article says: “For many of these students Ebonics is their language, and it should be considered a foreign language. These students should be taught like other students who speak a foreign language.”
In other words, she agrees with you that Ebonics is very different from standard English. She thinks students need to learn standard English. She’s proposing a way to make that happen that doesn’t involve pretending that the students’ current language is the result of laziness or unwillingness to learn.
Spanish is a legitimate language with its own culture, sounds, history and legitimacy. Ebonics is none of that.
I see both Pionar’s and QiaB’s points.
I think Pionar should remember the goal isn’t to get these kids into college, though that would be ideal. The real goal is to get these kids a basic education that would serve them in getting a job or skill.
Without a basic education, these kids don’t have a shot.
Yet this strategy is making the equivalent of goo-goo a legitimate language, when it isn’t.
Of course not. Neither do we expect them to emerge from goo-gooing by shoving college textbooks under their noses. We implement a carefully planned strategy to get them from where they are to where they need to be.
OT:
Touché . However, Cajun is descended from Acadian French.
Here’s another piece of stupidity from today’s Sun-Sentinel that demonstrates how fucked up schools are:
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/sfl-cplaygroundjul18,0,1908767.story?coll=sfla-home-utility
Kids aren’t allowed to run in the playground and they’re getting rid of swings & other playground equipment that’s too dangerous.
Don’t mind me…having Frank withdrawals already.
I’m down with Quaker.
It sounds like an attempt at a different approach to teach black kids so that they learn the common usage of English rather than an attempt to recognize a new language.
As it sounds, I’m not overly confident in its success as the biggest problem for all kids to me has to do with young, single, uneducated moms not being able to adequately prepare their children for school and assist them in the learning process. But in a school that is failing to teach its black students common language skills, why not try something different to reach these kids?Let ‘em try it in one school … nothing wrong with a little local experimentation. If it fails, toss it. If it succeeds, try it in a couple more places.
What I don’t see is any alternatives being offered by the plan’s critics. Is continued failure acceptable?
QiaB:
But, we don’t teach kids who speak creole/cajun/whatever using cajun, we teach them using standard English. We don’t teach kids that “gotta” and “hafta” are correct but different, yet people use them. Sure, I say “gotsta” as in “I gotsta go”, but I’m under no illusions that that’s a proper way to say things.
It’s true that black language has deep roots. But so does southern language. Every region/culture has its own dialects. But all those students are taught basic English without needing translation.
There are many problems with our education system. The lack of teaching with Ebonics is not one of them.
“Language” and language are not the same thing. A proper language has rules: grammar, punctuation, spelling, pronunciation, syntax, etc. “Language” (e.g. “black language”) is dialect, an inflection and style of language often departing enormously from those rules, not language. If the point is to give these kids an education, then coddling their DEFICIENCIES IN LANGUAGE is the opposite of giving them an education.
If you have misconceptions about science and I encourage that, then are you learning anything or are you being reinforced ignorance? It’s almost literally the same as being taught creationism as science. Craetionism isn’t science and “ebonics” isn’t a language.
Ebonics : Language :: Creationism : Science.
Flat out.
An education is supposed to allow you to improve, to give you a footing in life. If your deficiencies are reinforced, then there is no forward movement.
I never bought into the idea that ‘ebonics speakers” were the
same as “spanish speakers”, etc. Hispanic, Thai, Veitnamese, and many other ethnic communities have radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, supermarkets and social gatherings that allow someone to stay insulated from english. The same is not true for ebonics. Ebonics speakers grow up watching american TV, listening to american radio, going to american movies, and shopping in american stores. They may speak ebonics, but they understand spoken english; maybe not at the college level, but enough not to need an ebonics translator to understand it in a classroom.
Grubi, I find your analogy quite enlightening. I am reminded of European colonials who exterminated the indigenous populations of God-knows-how-many ‘virgin’ lands, usually using the rationalization that the ’savages’ couldn’t handle ‘civilization,’ and it was their fate (or their ‘fault’, or whatever) to perish.
The arrogance of those who assume that evolutionary theories can be regarded as scientific fact seems to be the prime motivation behind stuffing all creation theories and myths into a tiny, cartoonish pigeonhole. Though I personally believe that a higher power is responsible for designing the universe, I don’t claim to have all the answers. Nor do I stoop to ridiculing those who believe in various evolutionary theories, even though the dearth of substantiated evidence behind their theories means that said theories require at least as much faith as my own beliefs.
Similarly, I cringe whenever I hear or read reflexive condemnations of “Black English,” or “Ebonics,” or whatever you want to call it. The African-American community has a centuries-long history of having its original (African) cultures stripped away and cut off, while being officially and systematically denied (through slavery, Jim Crow, and less institutionally direct means) ‘mainstream’ education. Considering that the Civil Rights Act is only a few short decades old, the leaps and bounds that the African-American community as a whole has made in that blink of an eye– as respects its ongoing recovery from centuries of wholesale economic and psychic oppression– has been quite impressive, indeed.
The fact that so many US citizens of African descent have been able to break some of the more obvious chains of mental slavery is commendable. However, when we who are able to communicate in the current vernacular of the larger culture are so violent in our rejection of our brethren who have yet to make that leap, we are being quite hypocritical and self-defeating.
If these kids speak “Ebonics” at home, and they learned it from their parents, and they can all communicate clearly with each other, then they are using language as it is appropriate to their world. For us to assume that they should automatically do otherwise– and to denigrate their collective character for failing to do so– speaks less to a pathology within them than to one within us. Why is it that we fear acknowledging something that is so real to so many people? Is our cultural self-esteem so fragile that we need to vociferously segregate ourselves from those who ‘embarrass’ us?
It is true that a lack of fluency with the current standard of North American English can be a formidable barrier to functioning in US society, especially for those whose skin color already marks them as inferior in the eyes of the larger culture. However, spitting on those to whom that language standard is as good as foreign is counterproductive, as is throwing stones at those who are making honest attempts to bridge the gap.
The writer of the article that Oliver linked couldn’t have been more UNclear. She writes that the sociologist wants Ebonics “incorporated” into the program. What the hell does that mean?
Does it mean teachers will speak in Ebonics? That students will be taught the history and usage of Ebonics? Or does it mean that the method of instruction will change to take account of students’ lack of familiarity with standard English?
As I recall, the Oakland school board first pushed the Ebonics concept as a guise for seeking more federal money to help minority students. The idea wasn’t to perpetuate Ebonics, but to teach students who spoke non-standard English in the same way as students who didn’t speak English at all.
If you’re a skeptic that Ebonics is a “real” language, but a horrible mutation of standard English, why wouldn’t you support a plan to move kids away from it?
Oliver,
You are spot on here. Its rather refreshing to see that in some cases, politics aside, we all just want whats best for people and our collective future.
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