Someone Blew Up America

[Sip]

Wow ... pretty fascinating about Norway. I had no idea. I don't think they have anything like that in Germany. The area we lived in for a while, had a very specific and thick accent. However, they taught us standardized "pure" German in school. It was funny since I had learned German mostly by listening to the kids and people around so I did have some trouble adjusting to the clean written german in school ... I basically did have to relearn some things.

 

Nairi, I think your point is solid and well said and I am definitely not qualified enough to argue with it! However, the more I think about it, the more I realize that it is probably not to the best interest of those kids to cling to their "cultural" roots like that.

 

Suppose I am a boss at some big company one day and I want to hire a new employee ... suppose I got 2 letters from 2 very capable candidates. One says:

 

"Dear Sir, I would really like to join your company and I believe I can be a great asset to the team."

 

The other says:

 

"Yo dawg, this fo be wanting to hang with yo bling bling and I be all dat you dig?"

 

Which one of those two do you think will get the job?

 

What is really in the best interest of those kids? To preserve their culture and be nobodies when they grow up (that's how I see it) or become educated professional members of the society that can THEN go and learn all they want about their culture.

 

Also, I think you especially can relate ... coming from a background of having to deal with multiple languages, I don't think it is that unimaginable to speak one language at home and learn a completely different and "standardized" language at school while still maintaining true identity, culture, roots, etc

[gamavor]

Nice try Moshe Ibn Khodja Allah Akbar TolmudOglu Hasan Mehmet Ibrikchi Gionsurat Semite Aga (the last one please close the door!),

 

To me your kind (MOshe) and the Other kind (Ibn whatever) are the same person with different cultural coloring.

If you are Armenian I'm Eskimo.

 

Your Buddy above tried unsuccessfully to justify the horrors committed against his own people by claiming that the "white" race and the whole European Civilization are guilty for something. He has no idea about that "something" and that is why conveniently he uses GENERALIZATIONS which are easy to grasp for the masses. WE in the East have had enough of that ideological garbage. The mere fact that his apologetic writing (I don't call this poetry) somehow misses important historical developments is a proof for that. Don't try to politicize a very obvious racial scribing.

 

And please take your pills on time!

[khodja]

Gamavor,

 

If I were not afraid of the doctrinaire Armenians, I would meet with you face to face and you would see immediately that I am Armenian. To you an Armenian has to meet certain litmus tests, namely to blindly follow the traditions of the Armenian Church and the traditional beliefs inherent in Armenian culture. I despise Khachigian and all the other Armenian Republican hacks. I admire Harpootlian, Eshoo, Garabedian, Simitian and all the moderate Democrat Armenians, including moderate former Republican County Executive Michaelian and the old version of George Deukmejian before he became a fanatic like the rest of the Republican Party. You show your colors very clearly Gamavor. This is America, not Stalinist Russia or Ottoman Turkey. We are not going to let Ashcroft turn America into a police state.

[Azat]

Dear Nairi,

The major argument behind it is because teaching kids Ebonics is keeping them behind. It is putting yet another separation between people who speak Ebonics and people who speak standard English.(notice I did nto say blacks and whites because there are MANY blacks who speak proper/standard English) These people have an easier time getting being accepted to better universities and getting higher paying jobs and advancing in their careers.

 

All this is because Parents/Politicians/School Administrators/Teachers are cowards with no courage who do not want to spend the extra time with these kids, but rather blame it on "Standard English" and throw in a new dialect called Ebonics.

 

I do not have a problem with your argument that it is a different dialect and that African Americans or anyone for that fact should learn it if they want to, but lets not do what Oakland school district tried to do by trying to teach Math, Chemistry, History, Government, etc, etc in Ebonics.

 

These kids already have many disadvantages when they are ready to get a job(color being one of the biggest) lets not add another.

[nairi]

This is interesting, because now we come to "lingua francas" (languages that are used as a means of communication among people who have no native tongue in common). For instance, English is a lingua franca throughout India. This means that an (educated) Bengali speaker would communicate in English with an (educated) Tamil speaker, if neither knew the other's first language. Hindi is another lingua franca used mainly in the northern part of India.

 

As you can see some countries may have more than one lingua franca. China is an interesting example because it has four official lingua francas: Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka and Tiechiu. In each urban Chinese community one of these languages normally functions as a lingua franca.

 

Now, coming back to the resolution, African Americans want to teach African American English as a first language and American English as a second, more or less making American English function as a lingua franca:

 

Nairi

[nairi]

Yes there are. But most of these many blacks also speak "Ebonics" in their own environment, proving that it is possible to learn both.

 

Isn't this exactly THE taboo that African Americans have been struggling to break? I.e. it's not about being right, it's about being white?

 

Who the smartest

Who the greatest

Who the richest

Who say you ugly and they the goodlookingest

 

This is a moral dilemma for me. I see the failure in practice, but I also see the failure of so-called Armenian schools in America where your average student hardly speaks proper Armenian, let alone reads and writes it.

[Azat]

I agree with many of the things that you are saying here Sip.

 

I do not think that they are saying that. I think the goal is to teach kids in these public school everything in Ebonics. Not like taking an ESL class. I am a student of the ESL system when I came to this county, but when I use to take History, Math or any other subject they were not in ESL but rather standard English.

[Azat]

I am not sure(someone please correct me if I am wrong) but I think Armenian, Armenian history, Armenian etc... are the only topics in Armenian in Armenian schools in the US. I think all other topics are in English.

 

Not necessarily true. My ex-coworker with an MBA from Penn State spoke proper English at home and at work and I am certain that most who speak proper outside of home speak proper English at home.

 

Well... It is back to the black and white or better yet a racist issue. The racism in this country is more on behalf of minorities on them selves rather than whites on minorities. There are all kinds of statistics that can prove this, but we tend to only focus on one side of the issue because minority leaders keep reminding us of that.

[Rubo]

Nairi jan, I am not against Ebonics for what it is folk dialect however no studies proved that Ebonics helped the kids to perform better at schools. Please read this article.

 

Ebonics, math scores, and the way children learn

Richard "Doc" Rioux

 

I am the product of private and public schools. I was taught by nuns, priests and brothers through high school before going on to California State University, Northridge and then to the University of Southern California.

It's been well over ten years since I taught school part-time and over twenty years since I taught full-time. When I taught high school, I taught mostly history but did teach an occasional math section or two. I also taught in a junior college and a university.

These experiences, in addition to raising four children of my own while married to a woman who is a marriage and family counselor and who talks about education a lot, have allowed me to reflect on how children really learn.

The current debate over Ebonics in Oakland and the continuing discussion over why U.S. math scores among high school students compare so poorly to those of students in other industrialized nations of the world have raised some core issues that we should all be reviewing.

It is clear by now that children are able to learn different subjects at different times in large measure as a result of their genetic propensities, biological age and social environment.

As their bodies and minds develop from birth through their teen-age years, kids go through stages of growth that make them more or less receptive to certain subjects and ways of learning. Three- and four-year-olds find it far easier to learn new languages than 15- and 16-year-olds. Fifteen- and 16-year-olds in high school are far more likely to understand word problems in math than most of their younger counterparts in elementary schools.

Older kids reason better than younger kids, and younger kids have better memories for detail than older kids. Younger children tend to be more physical and visual, while older children tend to be less physical and given to more reasoned argument.

As a rule of thumb, therefore, the more rote memorization there is in the earlier grades, the better children will learn. The so-called "reformists" in modern education who forced the introduction of reason too early in the teaching of math and other subjects in American schools have met with disaster. The results of the so-called "New Math" and "Fantasy Lunch" have been deplorable. Parents don't know what's going on, can't help their kids, and find most teachers frustrated by the stupidity of the textbooks they're forced to use.

Young children learn best by being required to memorize poems and work out math problems with a pencil, paper and eraser. Take the calculators out of junior and senior high school. We must allow kids to use their brains to reason out problems, and give them problems to work out every night. It really bothers me when my children come home with math problems and don't have to show their work nor how they arrived at the answers. You learn math by doing problems again, again, and yet again.

You can't learn Standard American English well unless you diagram sentences, know the parts of speech, read great authors, write a lot and commit poems to memory. You can't learn American history unless you know the names of the presidents, analyze the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and memorize the dates of major events. You can't paint a Rembrandt if you haven't mastered the skill of drawing faces. You can't get to the moon unless you can calculate the area of a triangle.

This brings me to the matter of Ebonics -- a word derived from the marriage of "ebony" with "phonics" -- which members of the Oakland School Board recently used to describe the speech dialect of some Americans of African descent.

No matter how I've tried to understand the logic of declaring Ebonics a language, I can't escape the view that the effort is demeaning to American children of African descent.

It is one thing to "get down to it" with friends and with family members in the privacy of your own group and speak in the familial and folksy matter that permits you to identify with the cultural roots of a treasured historical past. It is quite another thing to try to elevate the folksy dialect to the level of a language because you think you are better able to reach and educate the children who use it or to justify getting federal money for doing it.

I think the move for Ebonics underscores the gross misunderstanding that many politically correct professional educators have acquired regarding how children learn.

The success of a child must be modeled after the best and the brightest this nation has produced, not the dumbest and dullest. American education must get back to basics and stop experimenting with every educational fad that appears on the scene.

Phonics is far better than the "whole language" approach in teaching children how to read. Memorizing times tables is far more productive for an eight-year-old to do than having him try to reason why people conceived of triangles. American education is in trouble today because it has sought to substitute concern for building self-esteem in children for the basic educational skills that must be acquired in order to achieve true success in the workplace and beyond. Education remains the most important key to equal opportunity and to ultimate freedom in this country.

Reaching for the highest standards of literacy must be the goal of every school-aged child. And this goal cannot be reached unless our children leave elementary and secondary school with their MEMORIES filled with math formulas, the order of the planets in the solar system, the names of all 50 states, and poems by Walt Whitman and Maya Angelou.

[nairi]

What is the African American view on this?

[bellthecat]

Do they need to have views? I thought they had "educators" and "activists" and "community leaders" that did away with the need for them to have views on anything.

 

Although that "Oakland Resoluton on Ebonics" is the funniest thing I've read for some time, it is probably too serious a matter to dismiss as "only in America". The fascistic undertones in it are all to obvious: you are what we say you are and not what you want to be. How else can you account for concepts like "these studies have also demonstrated that African Language Systems are genetically-based". No language is genetically based!!

 

Steve

[Rubo]

After spending good two hours serving the net on Ebonics I have come to realize the ignorance of my remark (slang) Ebonics is not a slang but phonic fusion of west African languages. Its use among African Americans is wide and in some instances the white teachers really have hard time understanding Black students. The issue was training none black teachers Ebonics so they can better understand the black students and from the kids perspective Standard English sounded like a foreign language to them according to some articles I read. This point is slightly add that considering how much inner city kids spend time watching TV which is mainly standard English. I am no way close to be knowledgeable on this subject and I suspect strong dislike Sip and others felt about the poem may have been lock of familiarity of Ebonics since they viewed the poem from a standard English perspective. I personally like the poem, it sounded like a song or a drum rhythm.

[Azat]

Okay. I reread the poem one more time and I still think that it stinks. It is not that I do not understand the message(I do, loud and clear) it is that what he said is all BS.

 

Here is more info about the Poet Amiri Baraka

(the author Stanley Crouch is an African American who is a regular contributor to NY Daily News)

 

The unmasking of a phony black hero

 

http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com -- THE mighty thinkers of our time, it often seems to me, are treated superficially while the fools are allowed free rides.

 

One of the mighty thinkers was Ralph Ellison, who, as last week's PBS special demonstrated, was accused during his lifetime of being "Eurocentric," meaning that he valued Western culture over Afro-American or African culture. This is the kind of imbecilic thinking that misled so many people during the '60s when the civil rights movement was superseded by black power. Fantasies took over about Africa as a paradise lost, and there was widespread faith in the most embarrassingly naive - or lunatic - of all conceptions, which was that America would fall at the hands of purported revolutionaries such as the Black Panthers.

 

A central figure in the pollution of that time - and ever since - was Everett Leroy Jones who became LeRoi (French for "the king") Jones, who became Ameer Baraka, who became Amiri Baraka.

 

Jones was featured in the Ellison documentary and allowed to condescend to a writer far superior to himself - to a man who, once he grew up, never gave in to racism, anti-Semitism or lightweight Marxism.

 

Jones fell for every one of them. In the mid-'60s, full of black nationalism, he left his interracial marriage to a Jewish woman and became a large and dangerous figure, throwing aside a substantial literary talent in favor of agitprop rants of one sort or another.

 

He was the central founder of the so-called Black Arts Movement, which failed to produce one major work of art. As the late Leon Forrest always asked of those who praised that dive into narcissism, poor craft and bigotry, "Where are the books?" There is no serious answer.

 

But things are finally getting better. In "Amiri Baraka, the Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual," Jerry Gafio Watts gives Jones the shellacking he has long deserved by simply looking at his writing and posturing.

 

Detail by detail, stage by stage, he pulls the revolutionary suit off Jones with superb analysis and high style.

 

Watts writes of Jones: "... He advanced a political line that was socially retarded, even for the times. The viciousness of his sexism, the obscenity of his anti-Semitism and the ridiculousness of his pipe dream to usher black Americans into African feudalism demand a day in public court ... [on charges of] advocating an atavistic, black neofascism."

 

Jones left that behind and went on to become a Marxist revolutionary of the sort we are now accustomed to - the kind who fights tooth and nail for a tenured position at an American university!

 

This book should be read by students of black studies across this nation. Then maybe politically correct professors will begin telling the truth about some people who are now canonized as heroes while real heroes like Ralph Ellison remain misunderstood.

[Rubo]

Ebonics for Blacks, Chinonics for Chinese, Los Amigos el englasias for Chicanos,Armonics for Armenians, Vudonics for Haitians, Mambonics for Cubans etc.

Please these are just excuses for incompetence plain and simple. This not an issue between liberals or republicans but kids getting a proper education. Blacks having the race issue against them they don’t need more ammunition like slang when going to higher education or looking for a job.

[nairi]

That's my point. Armenian language, literature and history are taught so poorly and the emphasis on English is so strong that most students' knowledge of Armenian can hardly be called adequate.

 

Sorry. I didn't mean to say that they use African American as a standard language in their household, I meant to say that many (not all) have a tendency to switch once in while, be it for comedy, imitation of or communication with other community members etc.

[nairi]

Azat,

 

You merely posted one point of view. According to most Armenians Saroyan was a hero as well. But according to those few critics we have, he was an idealist who lived in a dream world.

 

Again, I never said I agreed with the content of the poem (although parts of it are undeniably true), I was merely referring to the style.

 

Rubo,

 

Unless you already have, you should read "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker.

[nairi]

Then what is the view of their community leaders, educators, activists and critics?

 

This was indeed a ridiculous statement.

[Sip]

Which one? The first part or the second part? I happen to fully agree with "no language is genetically based" thing.

 

---

Edit: I am thinking that the word "indeed" was meant to confirm bellthecat's statement.

 

[ August 30, 2002, 02:31 AM: Message edited by: Sip ]

[nairi]

Sorry. I don't know what my problem is lately, but I'm sounding more and more confusing, even to myself.

 

I meant to say that "languages are genetically based" was a ridiculous statement, thus agreeing with Steve.