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Old 05-13-2019, 03:08 PM   #248 (permalink)
The Batlord
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Join Date: Jan 2011
Location: Beating GNR at DDR and keying Axl's new car
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lisnaholic View Post
Our experience of teaching is sooooo different, OH.

I really like teaching grammar - but my students come to it fresh and feel a sense of achievement as they learn to express their ideas with greater precision. If you were trying to modify ingrained habits of speech, that was much less welcome, I'm sure. I suppose some uplifting talk about improving students' job prospects would've been pretty futile.
Gotta admit I'd hate teaching a bunch of black kids "proper" grammar. I love ebonics. It's so much more fun and flows off the tongue so much more satisfyingly and as someone seemingly trying to break them of their "poverty ghetto slave" habits I'd feel like a cultural terrorist trying to force whiteness on them to erase a part of themselves, like I was whipping them and telling them that their name was Toby.

****ing white people know what they're saying, it's not a different language, so who ****ing cares? Language is simply a means to communicate and if two people can communicate then why does it matter if their syntaxes aren't a carbon copy of each other? When language becomes a means to separate races and classes then it's not the person being criticized who needs to shut the **** up.

Quote:
Spoiler for a good teaching moment:
I once spent about 90 mins of class going through the twelve basic English tenses: uses, question structures and all. I noticed one guy spent the class furiously writing notes, and at the end of the class he came up to me, shook his notes in my face and said, "This is gold. Pure gold." He was from Peru, so probably knew gold when he saw it.
Did he call you Jerry? And lol at Peru gold.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by J.R.R. Tolkien
There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamiting factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.
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