Bruce Deitrick Price...I've become cynical about educators; so many of their ideas turn out ruinous. A big portion of the public seems to be similarly suspicious. Perhaps that’s why, when the local paper discussed a new book, Teaching Standard English in Urban Classrooms, many people were quick to condemn what they assumed was more of the same old nonsense.
This was my own initial reaction. But I quickly recanted. I imagined the code-switching strategy in practice. I became sure that, at the end of day, students will know more, not less. And that is the measure I care about.
Authors Rachel Swords and Rebecca Wheeler recommend a kinder, gentler approach. Don’t demonize what the kids do wrong. Instead, let them view Standard English as another choice, one that is appropriate in certain settings. All that these educators are saying is: be considerate; use diplomacy; you catch more flies with sugar than vinegar. Agreed.
Fact is, every group in the world has its own slang. Consider a bunch of old Army guys. Who cares if they get together and talk about chow, mess halls and SOP?
Every middle class person has words and phrases (job related, for instance) they will use in certain situations but not in others. People who like vigorous swear words are code-switching all day long. I’ve done it. People with huge vocabularies have to code-switch in the other direction: simpler words. We all adjust and moderate our language, depending on the audience, as a way of getting along with people and not offending them.
Furthermore, most minority kids, those chiefly addressed by this new strategy, are already code-switching. You don’t think they say things to each other they don’t dare speak around Mom??
Bottom line: this strategy helps us reach an important goal. We want to be able, in classrooms, to present a lively defense of Standard English and the rewards of using it. This should be such an easy sell. English is the world’s number one language. Aren’t we lucky! Learn Standard English and you can go anywhere on the planet and find people you can talk to.
The weird problem comes when you can’t even bring up the subject, due to Political Correctness or fear of hurting someone’s feelings. This paralysis happens, I believe, in thousands of classrooms. Results: many kids are pushed out into the world never knowing they have a sign on their foreheads which reads: Barely Educated.
When educators do come up with something useful, I say we should sing songs in the streets. It’s that rare. I believe, in this case, that Swords and Wheeler are showing real smarts. Their book is published by National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE).
PS: Some of you may wonder why I’m so suspicious of educators. I’ll give a few examples. Look-say (a/k/a whole word) seems to me a hoax (not a mistake but a conscious scam). New Math is another hoax that was sold as salvation. Also New New Math, Mathland et al...The more I have researched education, the more it has seemed to me a field crippled by bad ideas and bad faith. I believe we can do better. I have a site devoted to this quest: Improve-Education.org.
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Written as a letter to Portfolio Weekly of Norfolk, Va. The two authors work in this area.