From the Mutt’s Mouth

My grandma was born in Gothenburg, Sweden, an idyllic seaside town on the southern coast of the Scandinavian peninsula. Grandpa was born in a hut with a dirt floor a couple dozen miles outside León, Nicaragua. They met at a club in New York City, and since their command over the English language was barely conversational, they danced to get to know each other. After getting married, they had four children and lived happily in a Queens suburb for over fifty years.

Before that, though, they got a bit better at speaking English. All they wanted to do was learn as much as they possibly could; Grandpa read the Peanuts comic strip every morning and Grandma chatted with the neighbors (who were from Australia) for hours while she gardened. They truly wanted to speak and write like Americans, so they interacted with the language as much as humanly possible. And when their children started going to school, they hovered over their shoulders and absorbed all they could from their English homework. Finally, they were interacting with a real curriculum that taught proper grammar, spelling, syntax, and diction to the language they had been grappling to understand since they presented their papers to the immigration officials on Ellis Island.

And they learned that most everything they knew about how to speak and write English 'correctly' was wrong. They started anew out of these elementary school workbooks, right alongside my dad and his siblings.

Reading Delpit's article, I thought of them, and then I thought about my dad, the child of poor immigrants, entering New York's public school system to fall victim to all the harmful pedagogal practices that will ultimately irrevocably oppress minority students and leave the white, middle-class status quo in their predestined positions of power until hell freezes over and then some.

My dad grew up to be the second in his family to attend college (his older brother beat him by two years), graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in mechanical engineering, and is now a commercial airline pilot for a living. 

But he hates English. 

So is he a 'tragedy'? Did his English teachers simply smile vapidly at my unteachable minority father and concentrate their efforts elsewhere? Is he simply a new member of the white middle-class status quo even though he is a (self-described) mutt?

I truthfully still am confused by what ideas this article was trying to convey. In fact, I was so shocked by the vernacular it used (The Whites, The Blacks, and other such The Nouns) that I made a pointed effort to see what year it was published in, and 1988 seemed a little late for such polarizing language to be used with abandon. But that's the other thing that struck me about the language; even in the title, the word 'Other's' seems to have this racially charged nature about it, so much so that it kind of makes my skin crawl.

Delpit's examples pulled a lot from contained instances that she seemed quite confident to paint as universal truths, which to me were arbitrary. They worked for her points, conveniently enough; the one that made me especially laugh was the example about kids being more or less likely to be exposed to directive language at home based on their race or class. Growing up in a mixed-race, middle-class household, I personally have been told to get my ass in the bathtub on many, many occassions. But I can't remember Delpit ever outlining any norms for The Swedish-Nicaraguans, so who knows. 

I did like the idea of using a student's expertise to their advantage to help them learn, but she lost me when she tried to insist that a universal curriculum that doesn't include these things is somehow 'robbing' them of that expertise. I don't even buy the idea that, in the student's mind, it gives their specialized knowledge less value when it isn’t used in the classroom. Children will pick and hold what they are truly interested in their hearts /forever/, and I think academia gives itself a little too much credit to think they could ever possibly wrestle it from them. Speaking from experience (I, too, was once a child), I couldn’t be bothered to do my math homework, but I could recite the lyrics to Led Zeppelin's entire discography by the time I turned 13. I never got the chance to use that knowledge to make my middle school Shakespeare unit any easier. I'm currently feeling a little bit cheated about that. 

So what of my grandparent's expert knowledge, then, or my dad's? As soon as they got the chance to formally learn the language of their new homeland they were all too delighted to trash the fragmented, awkward prose they had been limping around on and only remedially improving by interacting with the other immigrants in their social circle. English was a way for them to connect, a means out of the social and cultural isolation they would have found themselves in if they couldn’t strike up a conversation with their neighbors. Miraculously, this infatuation with learning English and all the sensibilities that came with it did not result in the ‘cultural genocide’ that Delpit foresees; you can still stroll by my grandma’s house in Bayside and glimpse about a dozen Dala horses sitting neatly in her bay window. Stop in for chat and you’ll be served tea in a cup emblazoned with the Tre Kronor.

Now, in the realm of institutionalized academia, I don’t know how my grandparents would have fared. Neither of them got the chance to earn a college education, but I did ask my dad what, if anything, about growing up dirt poor with two non-native English speaking parents made learning English in school harder. He said it was annoying to have to make corrections to all the numerous linguistic errors he’d grown up hearing in his household, and when he got his English homework his parents could help him with it no better than he could help himself. But that is, essentially, it. He likes to refer to a few fine English teachers who actually prescribed him pertienent, accessible readings that really resonated. Everything else he found doable, but boring.

I asked him, “Did you notice any difference between the way white teachers taught you, as opposed to black teachers, or other minorities?”

He said to me, “Why the hell would you ask me something like that?”

I said nevermind.