Blog #5

I noticed that a lot of these articles were about adapting to another language in America. That is something that this class, as well as a lot of my other classes have been talking about, which means I have really put a lot of thought into all this. I really was struggling with what to write for this blog because I haven’t had to deal with a lot of this. I referenced other people’s blog for this because I needed some inspiration because I had some writers block with this one. The article that stuck out to me the most is Language Diversity in Teacher Education and In the Classroom because this is something that was brought to my attention a huge amount this year as I enter my teaching classes. I never thought about having to teach other cultures/languages as I decided to be a teacher—I always just pictured classes like mine in high school, which was diverse but we didn’t have any students (that I knew of) that didn’t speak English. Although, as I think about it—I never had any opportunity to read other students papers so maybe in theirs writing a slang came out that I was never able to notice.

Anyway, I really am intrigued to learn more about teaching more culturally diverse. The main part of the slam article that stood out to me was “In today’s society, grammar is often considered an indication of one’s class and cultural background”. This really caught my eye because I never thought about someone’s class affecting their language. As I think more about it though I can completely see how people may not be as well at speaking and writing because maybe they weren’t always able to put their full efforts into school. This year has opened my eyes to so many things you have to think about as a teacher and it actually is really scary because when I chose to be a teacher I was wanting to come in and try to make English exciting for kids, and for them to be able to write with their full heart without being scared of judgement and it just makes it that much harder when you realize that some people might not be comfortable because of their culture or class. Another thing that is difficult is that I am planning on being a high school teacher, which for a lot of people is the end of their education journey so any habits that a student has acquired in their last 11 years of schooling will be extremely hard to correct in just one short year.

The authors writing style was Standard English but also had a personality to it which I enjoyed, as for grammar there were a few things that I enjoyed that the author did. Towards the beginning of the article the author uses parenthetical dashes and I literally love parenthetical dashes because they really bring your eyes to that sentence. This is the example “… it seems that—unless there is effective…these teachers’ attitudes—“zero tolerance” will be there order of the…”

I really don’t know what attracts me to using dashes so much, I think it may be the fact that I never really got too crazy with my grammar and the craziest thing I usually do with punctuation is over use commas; therefore I get excited when I use dashes because I feel fancy.