Weekend reading and Introduction

For the weekend, I'd like you to study two pieces - the first is this website about African American Vernacular English, that gives particular linguistic details about AAVE. Work through those, and make notes as you're reading about anything interesting, surprising, or confusing that you notice in the reading. Then, go to D2L, find our class (Language and English Education), and find the section called "Content Browser." Click on "Language Diversity and Dialect" and you'll see, at the moment, just one pdf, "Pullum AAVE." Read it, and take notes while you're reading about two issues: first, make a point to identify anything you don't understand, and second, make a point to identify things that cause a strong reaction - sudden interest, annoyance, disregard, whatever. If you choose not to print off a hard copy, at least come to class with particular passages identified and notes about them, so we have a starting place.

Also, I never had you write an introduction, so I want you to do that, posted to your blog, by Wednesday. Just tell whatever you want about yourself, but it ought to include something about how you came to want to be a teacher. Here's mine, to start things off:

I'm in my 11th year, now, as a professor at MSU. Before that, I taught for four years at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. I did my graduate work at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I lived for ten years. As of a few months ago, I've lived in Montana longer than anywhere else in my adult life (which would never work as a slogan if I were running for public office here).  I've ended up teaching since I was a freshman at Marquette University, where I tutored students at the Milwaukee Urban Day School - since then, I've taught at MSU, KU, UW, I've taught adult literacy at the Goodwill Community Literacy Center in Seattle, Adult Basic Education at a vocational school, I ran a writing workshop in a county jail in Lawrence, Kansas for two years, and I taught for a year at a Christian university (Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana) in the center of Java in the most Muslim country in the world, Indonesia, as a Fulbright Scholar, two years ago. I like teaching, and my scholarship has mostly been about teaching, focused in large part on literacy studies - I'm especially interested in the ways the idea of literacy works rhetorically (it's always good, for the most part; put the word 'literacy' in front of something, and everyone thinks it is wonderful. You can get away with a lot if you use the right words...) One thing I've had to learn from teaching in so many places is that you better have a back-up plan, because what works in one setting never works quite the same way in another.

My scholarship now is on the history of the literacy test as an obstacle to vote (another place where the idea of literacy managed to prop up a deeply racist method of disfranchisement). I also write about the history of the Highlander Folk School (which is now the Highlander Research and Education Center) and I've been trying to write about my year in Indonesia - that's been harder, though.

I love teaching this class, and I know it will be even more interesting now that I don't feel beholden to including instruction about grammar. Language is so much a part of who we are that it's easy to never really think about it; it's obvious, like walking or breathing (which are of course not obvious either). But it's the heart of your vocation as an English teacher, and I hope you'll leave this class having asked yourself a lot of questions about how you understand language, that you'll be open to challenging your basic assumptions, that you'll be willing to explore points of view that you'd never imagined, and that you leave the class with a broader sense of why it matters for English teachers to have a critical perspective on linguistic matters. Every time I teach it I get excited; I'll do my best to help you find a similar enthusiasm!