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.