I am indebted to James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me in the creation of this post. Please take the time to read it if you are a teacher, interested in history, or are curious about what people have told you about the world and how much of it is true.
I will never celebrate Columbus Day. Well, I never really did celebrate Columbus Day. I mean, what do we do? Not anything really. It’s a wasted holiday that should be done away with immediately, and there wouldn’t be anything to miss if we did. Continue reading →
Recently I read the new juvenile fiction novel Wonder by R.J. Palacio, about a boy born with a facial disfigurement who is about to enter public school for the first time.
I was on a team with two others, Paige Horst and Katie Estes, cohorts of a graduate class in teaching young adult literature. Our goal was to create a book trailer for Wonder. We focused on the motif of space and the universe in the novel.
I recommend Wonder for adults and children. It’s a great message about kindness.
As a teacher, I feel I need to come out and say now that I am not a shadow scholar. I do not write papers for students. I have never written a paper for a student.
However, once I did completely re-write a paper for a fellow student when I was in college. It was the summer, he was taking a marketing course online, he wrote a paper describing a plan to market and sell paper towels that “open easier” because there is an opening tear strip, everyone knew it’s easy to open paper towels by poking the top hole, and he had a lot to work on in terms of grammar and mechanics besides. So I completely rewrote his paper. The trade-off: He let me cleaned the lazer tag arena for me while I “edited” the paper.
It’s been a whole summer since the decision in Giles Co. VA to remove the ten commandments from a public display and replace them with an alternative. This week many students will be going back to school, and some might even notice this new display when they pass by it. Maybe.
I didn’t go up on a mountain, didn’t have a personal conversation with God, and my face is not glowing. But I have read his book, his good book, and I can’t give you any new commandments. Not that I need to. Continue reading →
This weekend my blog is a guest post on Trae Bailey’s blog, The Curated Self, about the pros and cons of virtual learning, and where we can go from here. This is for everyone who ever has or may take one or more classes online.
Hear about those kids who bullied the bus monitor? I’ll let you read the full story below, which includes the harrowing video documenting the incident.
So here’s the thing: These kids have a lack of empathy. It’s primarily a parenting issue. Their parents are failing. That being said, here is what the school needs to do. We’ll call this the “shame and flame” deterrent:
1. The kids don’t ride the bus next year. Their parents have to take them to school. But, if they get a driver’s license, they have to ride the bus until they graduate.
2. Call an assembly in which every child on that bus (all of them, because in the recording none stood up for her) must apologize to directly to her, with their parents or guardians standing behind them, who will then apologize on their behalf as well. If a student refuses to apologize, they must refuse in front of the entire school so everyone knows
3. In that assembly, a letter will be read in praise of this woman and signed by every single other student in the school. Then the students who apologized have to write every word they said to her on a piece of paper and burn it. This last portion may be performed outside the assembly if necessary.
4. The school should beef up their anti-bullying endeavors according to how the PTA and student body see fit. This is primarily the parents’ jobs, but seeing as how you can’t rely on American parents to teach their kids how to nurture empathic intelligence, the rest of the community can pick up where they miserably left off.
5. And don’t give me any crap about good kids with good parents succumbing to peer pressure. They continued while the woman cried. “Kids will be kids” is a profane motto to utter in this scenario. Peer pressure is not a free pass to unleash evil.
The following is a clip from the documentary “American Tongues”
(beware of the use of a derogatory term, supported neither by myself nor, I imagine, the documentarians)
What’s your language prejudice?
When I was younger I had a lot. A little bit against ebonics, but most against redneck talk. I had friends who looked down on rurality and quaintness and so I did the same.
My dad swears up and down I used to correct his grammar a lot. I don’t remember doing that. What I did do was critique his pronunciation. That’s phonetics, not grammar. It did kill me when I was twelve and he would sit down at a Roanoke restaurant and say “weaww wa wah-er”. The waitress would ask him to repeat, and he would switch to a slow, punctuated version of the same pronunciation: “We. aww. wawn. waher.” At least, that’s how it sounded to me.
Now I’m much more tolerant of dialectical variation, thought I do recommend pronouncing your words according to your context, Dad.
But one thing I will teach my son is there is no “right English.” The closest thing to a standard is only standardized because it is used by those in power. It does not make you smarter. And even the most notorious “errors”, such as “he be goin’ to the store,” operate based on certain rules. Double negatives (“don’t have none”) were used by Chaucer, as were consonental metatheses (“Can I axe you a question”). Is a person dumber or more likely to join a gang because they say “axe”, or are they actually intelligent enough to adapt to the practicality of our English-trained tongues placing the velar stop prior to the post-alveolar sibilant fricative?
So as a teacher I teach my students the same thing I’ll teach my son. Learn to code switch. Some people want you to wear a coat and a tie to certain functions. Oblige them if you want to please them and get what you want from them. If it insults your sense of self identity, don’t do it. As a teacher I have to teach students how to writer “proper,” but it’s no more proper than their own tongue.
One of the miraculous gifts given to the apostles was the ability to speak in tongues. They spoke and everyone understood. They didn’t demand everyone learn Greek. or Hebrew. In fact, the language of the Bible is not the ritzy, “proper” Greek, but street Greek, barnyard Greek, the language of simple merchants and traders. Then there’s the good book story of the “shibboleth”, where one Palestinian tribe slaughtered the other, using their inability to pronounce a syllable as an excuse.
How do you view people based on how they talk? Do you judge them by their pronunciations, the grammatical rules to which they adhere, their colloquialisms? Or do you consider instead the content of their words, whether they be hateful or considerate, wise or foolish, critically incisive or muddling?
What’s your language prejudice, and what does it say about you? I submit that it tells me more about you than your own dialect does. Ain’t no buts about it.
CALEB COY 