Ebonics: a bad idea becomes a horrible reality

Great Debates
1

I just read in the San Bernardino News that ebonics is not only back on the table, but is being instituted. The impetus is unfortunate fact thet the blacks in the area do not do well in school and don’t go to college.

So, in an attempt to bring the kids’ scores up, they are claiming that ebonics is just another language, like French, Spanish, German, or Chinese.

So what do you think? Good idea? Asiniine? Offensive? Understandable? Racist?

Here is the link:

http://www.sbsun.com/Stories/0,1413,208~12588~2969790,00.html

Here’s another question: how long before we start hearing about the need for ebonics colleges so that the ebonics graduates can get their skoolin’ on for fo’ mo’ years?

2

What’chu talkin’ 'bout, magellan?

3

I aint be sayin SQUAT. I just be chilin.

Very good. But let’s not have this whole thing be a rehash of Ariplane.

This is actually happening. I think it’s amazing that these administrators are telling these kids that they don’t expect them to be able to handle normal English. What a vote of confidence and boost for their egos.

4

I read the article.

I’m a teacher in an urban district, with lots of black students. I would have been happy for some training in Black English (that’s the term that I prefer to "Ebonics, " a word I find needlessly silly), because sometimes I have trouble understanding my students who speak it, and it’s easier for me to lead a class discussion when I understand my students’ ideas. I’ve dealt with it by asking them to find synonyms or define their words, as a result of which I have a larger vocabulary than I used to, and so do they.

It’s true that Black English has fascinating roots in African languages as well as in southern dialects. I find that, in general, students learn more when I teach them the content without constantly correcting their grammar (though I do correct it when we’re specifically studying grammar or formal writing), and I do speak in Standard English to provide a model. I love Black English- it’s expressive, poetic, and rich with metaphor and image, and a fair amount of America’s best literature uses it. My goal is to teach my students to use Standard English while still using and valuing their own dialects.

As far as I can tell, the school board here is offering to train teachers to understand Black English and its history, and in the cultural differences they might have from their students, which I know I, first beginning to teach in a mostly-black school district, would have appreciated. They’re also offering also to offer black and white students classes in the African-American history, literature, and art.

The ‘second language’ wording isn’t the best way to put it, since Black English isn’t a language but a dialect, but I don’t have any problem with the actual proposal. My guess is that the press release was written by some school board person who didn’t know the difference.

I don’t see anything that involves asking teachers to speak in Black English, and while that would be ridiculous and insulting to students, it doesn’t seem to be what’s being proposed. It also doesn’t appear that they’re releasing students from the usual academic classes, just adding an interesting ‘extra’ group of classes, like my students already take art and music and dance classes.

This program, if people like the OP don’t ridicule it into being cancelled based on false assumptions, would probably be a good way to engage the interest of students who don’t get involved in their learning because they don’t think it has anything to do with them and their lives. I’ve seen my own students read books much more difficult than I thought they were able to, once they discovered good black authors like Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, because for the first time they found something in a book that they connected to. Most of these authors, besides being among the greats of American literature, use Black English in their writing.

What, exactly, about the proposal do you object to? I couldn’t tell, from your OP, what you think the ‘bad idea’ is, unless you’re working from the incorrect assumptions that teachers will be teaching in Black English or that students won’t be asked to learn anything else.

5

I can’t get the link to work.

6

If you, their teacher, have trouble understanding them, how do you think they’ll do when it comes time to interview for their first job? Somehow, I don’t think their prospective employer will find the etymological roots of their dialect as fascinating as you do.

7

As a Hispanic who grew up in the midst of Tex-Mex, I don’t think we needed a special language to even the playing field. We learned English, and some of us speak it quite well. I think education is partly about challenges, whether they are progressively challenging subjects like math, science, language et al, it’s not about skimming through. It’s about life preparation.

And none of my childhood role models were Hispanic. I was still inspired and have done quite well.

8

Couldn’t read the article effeciently… if the cost is reasonable, and there is accountability, I say give it a go.

However, unless state aptitude tests are going to be given in ebonics – ACTs, SATs, High School Equivalency Exams, LSATs, GMATs etc. etc. etc. – it’s hard for me to imagine exactly how they’re going to monitor the program’s effectiveness. Logically, what comes next are assertions that the previous tests all have to be changed in order to accomodate the Ebonics language OR they’d be discriminatory in their current state. Sounds like we may be taking the first step down a path to a money pit? And worse yet, doesn’t this serve to ecourage racial segregation and not academic/social integration?

If it were sold as a 5-10 year ‘experiment’ I’d vote for it in my state.

9

Ok, I got the link to work.

One problem I have, in addition to bizzwire’s point, is that black english, like any other slang, changes with extreme rapidity. If you look at slang in, say, The Autobiography of Malcom X you’ll find stuff that would be completely incomprehensible to any modern teenager. Does anyone say “I wanna pull your coat aboput a cat” today? Standard Englsih, while not static, changes slowly enough that we can understand Twain or Dickens–or W.E.B. DuBois for that matter–today.

All cultures have slang and dialect. Many of them, including Black English, are clever and expressive in a way that standard English often isn’t. But it’s the school’s job to teach standard English. Kids have no problem learning slang on their own. Would a teacher in a working class Italian-American neighborhood tell his kids to “Fuggedabout it,” or call a messed up assignment a “Fugayzy?” (sp?)

10

Maybe you missed the end of that paragraph, where I talk about how I teach them to use Standard English, too. I also teach my students about improving their reading comprehension skills.

They will need to know Standard English for their first job interview it. Some of them don’t know it now. It isn’t because they’re stubborn or stupid, and just saying ‘they should be expected to speak Standard English already’ doesn’t make it happen. We have to, you know, teach them, and that involves giving them a reason to try to learn.

And they’ll flat-out refuse to learn if you tell them that the way that they and everyone they loves talks is stupid and wrong, but they’ll try to learn if you tell them that there are appropriate ways to talk in different situations, and smart people know how to use them all, and show them authors like the ones I mention, who effortlessly shift between Black or Standard English depending on what’s appropriate.

11

Doesn’t word for me either. It’s impossible to comment on the OP w/o reading the article. Other than noting that:

is certainly true in a technical sense. Languages are fluid, and peopel everywhere speak fully complex languages no matter how far from the mainstream they are. So, let’s not get into the “Black English” = Lazy Language nonsense.

As a side note, I wonder why other accents/dialects don’t become issues here or in England (where the dialectical differences are much greater). I can barely understand many White people I’ve met from Louisanna. How do their kids handle schooling in “standard American English” or are all their teachers local?

12

Okay, I understand what you’re saying, but it’s not what’s being proposed.

No one is suggesting teaching students how to speak in Black English. Like you say, they already know. What they’re suggesting is giving students a choice. They will still take English class, where they’ll read great literature and modern classics and learn Standard English, just like they always have. If they want, they can sign up for a class to learn about the history of African-American culture, where they’ll perhaps start to feel proud of who they are, worthy to walk in the steps of their greatest ancestors ('cause these kids don’t know WEB DuBois, or sometimes even Malcolm X), and eager to do great things themselves.

Not stopping anything that’s already happening. Not abandoning the teaching of Standard English. Just adding something for those who are interested.

I feel frustrated because I feel like some of the posters in this thread are arguing against a straw man, against some clearly absurd proposal that no one but them is proposing.

13

If you copy the link to the address bar, it will work, but it won’t open in a separate window.

Looking at the typos in my second post, I may need some remedial English myself!

:smack:

14

Corrected link. This is yet another badly-written idiotic California article that misinforms the intentions of the school system. Ebonics is always primarily taught to teachers unfamiliar with African-American culture.

Fisher Queen pretty much has already nailed what I would have said, discounting her dismissal and characterization of the term Ebonics itself as “needlessly silly.” Two parts of her post that bear repeating:

"As far as I can tell, the school board here is offering to train teachers to understand Black English and its history, and in the cultural differences they might have from their students…"

The ‘second language’ wording isn’t the best way to put it, since Black English isn’t a language but a dialect…

This is basically the equivalent of training American English speaking beginning teachers of, say, Inuit, Philadelphia Dutch, Gullah and Creole students to first affirm and appreciate the legitimacy of their own dialects and then teach them Standard American English.

Ebonics inspires its own special brand of racial hysteria and intra-racial class bigotry.

15

I couldn’t get the link to work either, even when I copied the address. It’s the abbreviation that the SDMB uses that’s causing the problems. Had to use View By Source to extract the full address.

Anyway the full address is


http://www.sbsun.com/Stories/0,1413,208~12588~2969790,00.html

You can copy that into the address bar or Google and it works fine.

16

Larry Borgia

Provide Ebonics equivalents to the following words:

Melancholy
Contemplative
Sad

Each similar but subtly different.
I can’t get behind your statement, English is one of the most expressive languages on Earth.

17

I am willing to cheerfully retract “needlessly silly” as unnecessarily inflammatory.

I was under the impression that most of the dialect’s advocates didn’t much like the word “Ebonics” either, and I hear it in an insulting sense more often than any other way. Kind of like the phrase “Politically Correct,” which is only said by people who are insisting that they aren’t it.

18

Fisher Queen I understand your point. I may have misunderstood the article, which didn’t seem very clear. I certainly have no objection to high school kids reading works by prominent Black authors. I don’t even have a problem with them learning through pop culture. I learned to read as much through comics as through formal education, which I hated. So I can’t object to using pop culture as a way to get kids reading and thinking, though of course that should only be a first step. Also, if the stress on Black English is only to make sure the kids know they’re not being talked down to because of the way they talk, that’s fine too. I just think that approach applies to all children and teens, regardless of hue. No one learns from people who talk down to them.

19

  1. Like I said, I don’t speak Black English, so I’ll leave it to someone who does to answer your question.

  2. Black English IS English. I love English. I love the complex, meandering structures of William Faulkner. I love the terse simplicity of Ernest Hemingway. I love James Joyce’s surreal obscurity. And I love the passionate imagery of Toni Morrison, and I love the jazz rhythms of Langston Hughes, and I love the poetic resonance of Zora Neale Hurston. The many different ways to speak English help give our language its wonderful expressiveness, and I don’t have to choose between them. Neither do my students, and neither does any English speaker. We can have it all, and as English speakers, having access to all these wonderful ways of using the language is our birthright.

20

I agree with you there. I also teach my students how to write more clearly. I think this journalist could use some time in my classroom.