Literacy #3

Chapter 2 and Article on codeswitching

One of my favorite quotes from the Codeswitching article says, "when you lambast the home language that kids bring to school, you ain just dissin dem, you talking bout they momas." Besides the obvious satire in this quote, I really enjoy it because it brings to light a very important societal issue that we encounter in schools on a daily basis. Students come to school with so many different experiences and opportunities. It is unfair for us to expect them to know the same things, to have acquired the same vocabulary, or to use the same form of grammar. Recently, I was having a conversation with a friend of mine outside of the SOE. I mentioned pre-k, and he asked what the teachers could possibly teach to students at that age. I realized that it may seem that pre-k and even kindergarten teachers don't get a lot of credit for the subject material they teach. So they are teaching students shapes and colors instead of finding derivatives and doing logarithms, they may have the most difficult job of anyone. They are the first teachers to take students from all different backgrounds and try to catch them up to the same level of learning.
Both of the readings for today focus specifically on the language that is obtained outside of school and how we can help our students use what they have learned despite its seemingly obvious flaws in our "standard" English based schools. Codeswitching refers to how we switch the language we are using in different situations. We speak to each other differently outside of class than we do when addressing a professor or interviewing for a job. I grew up in a family that uses very thick southern accents when we speak. I have know lunch to be dinner and dinner to be supper. I know that a purse is a pocketbook and goin down yonder means that I am traveling a nondescript distance from wherever I am. However, since high school, I have been able to transform the way I speak to sound like a "normal" college student. To this day, I am afraid I will slip up and "talk country" which means I will not be taken as seriously in the academic community.
Because of this, I am really interested in this idea of contrastive teaching about languages. I like that both languages can be valued. I do not feel like the language I used growing up has been appreciated by a lot of people I have met at UNC. I even don't take people as seriously who use a country accent in the academic setting. This makes this a fun challenge for me to incorporate it into my classroom. I just hope, that I will have time to teach my students using this method. I have never observed a teacher do this successfully, and I would like to have a better understanding of how to make it work on a day to day basis.