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  • Essay / Lisa Delpit's take on different languages, stereotypes, and students' and teachers' relationships with other people's children

    I'm a white woman and I attended a high school that had a percentage total minority enrollment of only 18%. Growing up in a town with few minorities, I never really witnessed acts of racism. Until this class, I was quite sheltered and unaware that there are still inconsistencies and injustices between different cultures in the classroom. Lisa Delpit highlights many topics and issues in Others' Children, but three of them particularly intrigued me: linguistic diversity, stereotypes, and the student-teacher relationship. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay In part one, Other People's Children, Delpit discusses some of the experiences she has had as a Black educator. One of the topics she addressed was the major controversies surrounding diversity and language learning. When I saw the title of this section I assumed it would be about dealing with students whose first language is other than English, although this falls into that area I found it interesting that the emphasis be placed first on the differences in grammar and syntax. . Delpit described how Marti, one of his students, asked him, “Professor, how come you talk like a white person” (Delpit 1995, p. 48). I remember growing up and hearing students talk like this, so I think it's an important topic for future educators to learn. Delpit explains that teachers cannot simply suggest that "this form is 'wrong' or, even worse, ignorant" (Delpit 1995, p. 53), because that is probably how their loved ones speak and how they have been high, so the teacher would “suggest that something is wrong with the student and his or her family” (Delpit 1995, p. 53). That being said, teachers must teach their students the politically appropriate dialect form in this country, namely Standard English, because they will be less likely to succeed economically than their peers who do (Delpit 1995, p. 53) . There are a multitude of techniques that teachers can use to address this problem. They can get students involved with standard forms through role play, by asking groups of students to create bidialectal dictionaries of their own language form and standard English, or by producing daily news broadcasts for the rest of the school imitating the way famous presenters talk (Delpit 1995). ).Delpit explains the do's and don'ts for teachers in the classroom and stereotypes are a recurring "don't" throughout his book. Many teachers commonly associate “failure and socioeconomic status, failure and cultural difference, and failure and single-parent households” (Delpit 1995, p. 172). The problem is not the student, the problem is that because teachers create these connections to failure, they teach less instead of more. Delpit gives the example of a black mother who asks the teachers of her son, Terrance, about his academic performance in class. The teachers all responded that Terrance was “very well” (Delpit 1995, p. xxiii). However, when Terrance's mother received his report card, it contained all C's and D's. His mother was upset and when she asked how the teachers were able to respond with "very good", they responded with variations of : “For him, the C’s are great. You shouldn't try to push him that far.".