Paul Thomas’ open letter to future English teachers is both
to the point and full of heart. Speaking as an experienced English teacher, he addresses
the bureaucratic and social stigmas that English teachers must both face and
overcome in order to effectively do their jobs. The part of his publication
that I found most interesting was the bullet about “deficit views of language
and students”, and how language evolves over time. Having a lot of experience
working in culturally varied areas with adolescents, I’ve always been
interested by how slang becomes a word in common usage, followed by resistance
from the students’ teachers. Thomas states “claims about ‘correctness’ are
always more about power than either language development or literacy,”. I have
not had a lot of struggles with use of proper language in my writing, but the
fine line between slang and common language has always seemed blurry to me.
When regional dialects come into play as well, the subjectivity of the
situation really seems to surface.
I also found the point about "correctness" to be interesting. I feel that if we were to look back in history, we would be surprised to find that words we deem "correct" now were actually slang at one time. So as teachers, we should of course encourage students to be professional in their work, but not be as resistant to changes in day to day vocabulary that may occur. I also agree with "correctness" being about power and i feel that in a classroom community, the academic and learning power should be distributed amongst the teacher and the students.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what both Paul Thomas and Dan have to say about "correctness". Although using proper language is important sometimes I feel educators spend too much time making sure that the grammatical structure of a sentance, paper, etc that it is easy to over look the power of what the student is trying to say. Last year I spent sometime observing in a classroom that had several ELL students. Before a quick writing assignment the teacher reminded the students that it's ok if things are misspelled or messy as long as they could communicate their ideas. I feel it made the students be able to write and think more freely and develope their thoughts deeply because they were not so concerned with "correctness".
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