Week 10: Delpit, Young, and Me.

Delpit
From what I gathered from the Delpt article, teaching English to non standard English speakers is both controversial  and ever changing. There seems to be no "right" way to accomplish the task, but through critically thinking about the process, there is at least thought  and empathy through the process. Language is power, and white people tend to take this power for granted. This wasn't a white hate article, but certainly a diversity understanding of culture and knowledge article.  As educators, we need to embrace the cultural differences of our students, and not exclude their individual differences, rather let them own their individuality  In the classroom, the teacher and the students need to become "experts" in the material that they approach. By this, I mean, both student and teacher need to bring something to the table in terms of the educational process. We can then teach the students the language of power, through understanding that it is the "formal language" of society. But at the same time embrace our own language codes, they make us who we are!

Young
Young is a black man that is well versed in both BEV and WEV, and has constant racial identity conflicts with himself. He is constantly questioning the system, and doesn't exactly give the "right" answer to teaching students fluent in BEV, but rather gives insight to the situation. He claims that by allowing students to Code with and have plural dialects, an identity crisis is given to students. No one in the BEV and WEV benefits from these code switching dilemma, this is because it claims that one is more right than the other. He however states that the issue is within the schools, and that there needs to be reform of some kind. This article was a little heart breaking, but at the same time empowering into the black psyche.

Me
College has definitely been an eye opening experience. There were days that I use to say "tret" instead of "treated", and other parts of dialect that seem so strange to me now. People talk like their peers and their social settings do to their environments and upbringings. When I came to the relization that "tret" wasn't a word, I was about 16 years old, and a former girlfriend asked me what it meant. I felt like my world was shaken-- tret has been a word that I used all my life, and I never second guessed it. This slang had it's teeth sunk into my past, and my parents were the source of the issue. This opened doors to me, and a greater realization that everyone speaks differently. There are times that this word comes nearly out of my mouth, and even to this day, when I'm on the verge of saying  treated, tret is not too far behind in my mind. My ability to be conscinece about the actions I make in my language could relate to Delpit's idea of "code switching". When I'm with my parents, I seem to get back into my nasty habits of improper grammar. It's difficult, because I don't want to sound like a snob when I'm around them, so I tend to conform to the code that my family speaks. Young would agree that this part of my language is a partial identity, but at the same time, I'm resentful towards it.