I've been swimming and sinking these last two weeks, adjusting to online teaching.
I've added, and added, and added to this long essay about the way feminism shapes the expression of anti-racism on social media. I have my clever title, but a pretty sloppy shape of words right now that is not anywhere close to a cohesive argument. It takes turns down all kinds of avenues: make-up, wellness, and self-care amongst them. Are they dead-ends? Idk. I'm sure someone will write the essay better than I can and then I'll say, "That's what I thought!" (I'm also putting this out there to force me to take some action). (FYI: This post has nothing to do with this paragraph)
I've been thinking about this tweet by Kimberly Drew:
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| Tweet by @museummammy, "Grammar is a tool of white supremacy" in response to @britbennet's tweet, "My strongest belief about writing is that grammar is merely a suggestion." |
I freaking love language. I love those sentence mapping trees I drew in linguistic courses in college. I love looking at cumulative and periodic sentences and paragraphs. I love analyzing the grammar of advertisements and the bus stop. I love writing a really good sentence when I read one. I love feeling the music in the words on the page by a grammar that is so unique to one's writing (@ THE Toni Morrison). But my admiration of language extends in more harmful ways. I get a weird satisfaction of secretly correcting myself and others when speaking (yes, I correct myself because I'm META). I have bouts of rage when a business's social media post is riddled with grammar errors ("DID THEY PASS THE 6TH GRADE!?"). I don't even want to admit all the policing of language that I have done on papers coupled with intentional shaming with all-caps "WHAT?!" or "NO!" written in the margins of kids' papers (I cringe when I think about how terrible I have been). Maybe society is outgrowing the grammar that I know and love, and it might be a good thing.
When I entered my freshman year of college, I was a math major. Man, I loved math. I loved being able to solve problems by using my skills and tactics; it hammered home that patterns exist everywhere, even in the tasks that we need to accomplish and the problems we need to solve. The nuances of the world can be explained through the clean, irrefutable use of numbers. Words are much messier. But humans are also messy and that's why I love language. When people ask me why I made the switch from math to language (English and Spanish), I explain that yes, numbers can explain the world in a very clean way, but the nuances of language and words are far more complicated and messy and interesting. I remember describing the cognitive jump from math to language in an interview once: if I could teach a person how to use words to explain their ideas in the same sharp and clean ways that math can explain the world, then I would feel like I had done my job as a teacher.
But people are not always sharp or clean. Oftentimes they sit in their own pool of thoughts, dawdling in their indecision, trying to gather as much information as necessary (which oftentimes results in more confusion than clarity). I am starting to believe that whatever form that the "professional" or "academic" language that I expect from my students and others is actually white supremacist. Who has decided what is "professional" or "academic" and why do we find it so valuable? Because it is the shared language amongst [white] academics? Okay. 😒 Maybe the messier iterations of language that lack the normal conventions of grammar are far more interesting and human than we give credit. No person should rely on one medium to deliver information. Isn't that was Plato had a wedgie about? He was worried that if writing was reproduced that it would end up in the wrong hands and misinterpreted. Language is a communicative act; it can start the act or it can serve as a catalyst for it.
I have no idea what this means for school or teaching or assessments or testing. I do know that when I'm figuring out what a student means when they write something, the discussions we have to clarify and edit are rewarding, generative, and I learn more about them than just their written performance. The relationship that develops through reading someone's thoughts and speaking to them about them, asking the right questions, fumbling through assumptions, and laughing at tangents, that's the nuance of language and human expression that I love. When teachers and academics make the bold claim that "They won't be able to function in society!" because their grammar isn't tight, I want to offer a bold consideration: When we claim "function in society," whose society are you envisioning? The one that you grew up in? The one that has been historically dominated by white voices? The one that you operate and feel most comfortable in? If, as educators, we want to create and build a more equitable society, we have to think about dismantling the oppressive structures that have created barriers for certain populations. Standard English grammar is certainly one of those structures.
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