Week 6 Blog Post: Joshua Zaborowski

When reading Delpit it really opened my eyes up to a whole new world. It showed me the negative stereotype that “ghetto” and “Ebonic” language dialects receive. What I enjoyed most about this article was the fact that Lisa Delpit didn’t just complain about the situation, but instead explored what was causing this problem and how to fix it. The example I found intriguing was the one concerning her daughter Maya. Delpit didn’t realize the seriousness of this issue until it was in her own household, this isn’t saying that her daughter had a problem or anything it was just the start of her research. Throughout reading this article I found it eye opening concerning the correlation between a child’s native tongue and their self-esteem. I had never seem to noticed that the children I went to school with that had the least self-esteem were indeed the ones who had speech problems or spoke a different dialect of English. This being said I was encouraged as a future teacher to make this problem go away. It was refreshing to see somebody take initiative and find a way for students and children to incorporate their home language into the English language. Culture is a very important aspect in life for people and being able to combine that along with learning will allow for a better success rate. All we future teachers have to do is make it fun, flexible and welcoming. If we can succeed at this then we will be onto a better and brighter future not only for education, but culture and youth’s self-esteem.

For this blog’s revisions instead of re-writing out the whole paragraph above, I am going to be picking a sentence then switching into one of our sentence patterns of the week. This way it is much easier to follow my changes and for reading purposes as well. The first revision I believe that could be made from my original response is as followed: “What I enjoyed most about this article was the fact that Lisa Delpit didn’t just complain about the situation, but instead explored what was causing this problem and how to fix it” could be changed to I enjoyed that this article was a problem to resolution piece of writing. [Changing a long sentence into a much shorter one] Another revision I believe that would suit well for this week’s sentence patterns would be to emphasize the word “culture,” so to do this I made the following change:”… their home language into the English language. Culture is a very important aspect in life…” changed into their home language into the English language. Culture. A very important aspect in life. [Incorporating one word sentences] This allows for the word I want to emphasize stand out a great deal more. A pattern I could include without changing anything could be the sentence: Maya learned a new dialect. [Simple sentence] This would be good to include when I bring up Maya in my original response because it includes a little more information, but doesn’t go off topic. The next revision I would like to make for the response up above is changing the third sentence into a compound sentence, and here is how it would be done. I enjoyed reading about the articles problem, but also the solution to fixing the problem. [Compound sentence] For this revision I took out some words and added a few to make it a compound sentence; this adds some sentence variety and allows me to work on the patterns of the week. These were the 4 main sentence patterns I wanted to concentrate on because they were the ones I included the least in my response or didn’t include at all. When looking through my original response I didn’t add any more long sentences or complex sentences because they occur a few times throughout. Overall, for this post I wanted to concentrate on the patterns I don’t use to often and in addition I found it difficult to include some of these patterns when revising my own work. The reason being is because when I read over my own work it sounds perfectly okay in my head, but when I read it out loud I can see the areas in which these patterns would make sense to insert into.