Afro pick in ebonics, shall we?
 

choice ebonic phrases, anyone?

airplane had that classic jive scene which was mind blowing.

June Cleaver!


Skreet=Street
Aif=Eighth

I'm not very well versed in ebonics, but I do like "Don't be gittin' all up in mah grill mothafucka"

One of my friends (she's black) wrote on my paper at school.

"Use a crackhead" I asked her how I was I suppose to use a crackhead.

we were walking around in spanish harlem one day and these two guys standing outside of a project were having a conversation that went something like this:

"yo... that mufucka... he bleeped tha bitch."
"nigga **BLEEPED** da bitch?"
"straight up bleep. my nigga's rough!!"

i still want to know what bleepin' a bitch is.

Oh...the same friend was worried because a friend was gonna get in a fight with some one who was 'strapped' (which I learned means have a gun on them) and I said "If you're that worried, call the cops or something, fuck NWA, call the police." she replied, "I ain't callin' the popo!"

heeee heehhee
it's early for me but that really hits me just right ;)

from my old hometown of washington dc, a few choice words:

ax: lemme ax you somethin...
birfday: happy birfday
fitty senn: $0.50
ghetto heaven: not sure exactly, but when i told my friend lenny in my next job i was getting a raise, and i 'd have no boss, she told me i was in ghetto heaven

i fucking loved that town.

I'm quite a fan of Patois... I only recently discovered what raas claat meant. And it's not very pleasant.

Don chu cut your eyes a' me bwoy. That's an ace one.

When I was teaching SAT prep classes in ATL, most of the high schools I worked at were 99% black and I had to grade hundreds of essays.

It was hard to decide about some things - some students who were otherwise very smart, would write the most insane ebonicisms on their essays. I didn't know what to do, so I just counted it all wrong and told them that they needed to learn how to write differently than they talked. It sucks and it makes life hard, but that's the way it is - people won't take you seriously if you write like that.

Mein Gott...Was ist das?!?!

"Don't be gittin' all up in mah grill mothafucka"??!! uh I don't know ebonic at all..

"Afro pick in ebonics, shall we?"

Isn't chabib a clever one? I applaud his capabilities of word play.

He is indeed a cunning linguist.

ho ho ho.

thats a good one.

My virgin eyes!

yeah that's racism and discrimination unfortunately. "ebonics" makes perfect sense-- so your students weren't "otherwise" very smart-- they were just smart.

think more like you trying to write an essay in middle english.

OK, good point. I wasn't trying to say that they weren't smart, but that most people would interpret their writing as "not smart" and they'd have to adjust it at least to do well on the SAT, which is what they were trying to do.

Ebonics is consistent and has its own rules and everything, and I'm well aware of the difficulty that this creates for them. They're trying to learn two languages (or dialects) at once, and this make everything a little harder for them, like I said. But life is also harder for Asian kids who learn English as a second language or any other person for whom English is a problem. I have a friend who is Bulgarian and he gets bad grades on his papers because his English sucks. Unfortunately, nobody is going to make allowances. And really, they shouldn't. We can't have several different versions of English that are acceptable in the business or academic world or anywhere that precision is important.

So it's not necessarily racism. Should we have different SATs for different English dialects? Should we have the BlackSATs or have different grading systems? It may really blow for them, but it's just another way that life is harder for Black Americans. The way to fix it would be to fix the public schools, especially the inner-city ones. But good luck on that one. There is a built-in "fuck you" in the system that not only has to do with the schools but with the poverty problem and so on. Drastic changes need to be made to fix these problems - there is no way you could make Ebonics acceptable and even if you did it wouldn't really fix any of the deep-set problems.

You might say, "But they're Americans and their way of speaking English is as American as any other way. That's different from being an immigrant or whatever. We shouldn't treat them the same way we treat people who moved here on their own and were aware of the language problem they'd encounter." That's true and that's another reason why the situation sucks so much.

And you know, I write differently than I speak too. I have a Southern accent and I say shit all the time that I would never write. I say "y'all" and "ain't" and "fixin' to" and a lot of other terrible things - everybody has to learn to write differently than they speak. My friend Adam is one of the smartest people I know and one of the best writers I know, but he sounds like Boomhauer from King of the Hill when he talks. But like I said, the way to fix the problem is at a deep level and it would involve trying to achieve equality of opportunity....

Do I sound like a racist? If I do, tell me. (Racism is really the new ultimate put-down, but I won't mind) Was it wrong to tell those kids that they would score badly if they wrote what they turned in to me on the real SAT? Because they would and there's nothing I can do about that. I wasn't a dick about it either. I just tried my best to help them get higher scores - they weren't paying for the class; the county had funded the classes through my private company, Kaplan. The classes usually cost $1000 or so. I felt like I was doing something really good and I tried harder to help them than I did the rich snotty kids I taught sometimes (those that had paid). Oh well...

see, why not? simply politics...

i think you live in new orleans so you're aware of the french/cajun/creole distinction. they are different languages, yet european french teachers think cajun is "bad french" and creole gibberish. "ebonics" has evolved over an african substratum so naturally is different, just as english is different from german, etc. (there are differences of degree but this i hope illustrates my point). languages evolve and there is a failure of the educational system to recognize this-- this failure marginalizes perfectly smart students simply because they speak a different dialect of english.

language is a matter of politics. why aren't the SATs in latin, after all? shouldn't we all speak latin to ensure knowledge is universal? hm, im missing my own point- i guess what i want to say is that there are purely political, not linguistic issues. it's about power and politics. you do your students a favor when you ask them to learn the language of power, so they can transact with it; but you alienate them by dismissing their own language as irrelevant-- do i make sense with this?

i'm not blaming you for this of course. but since you're one of the smartest people here maybe i'm trying to provoke you to reevaluate some assumptions.

unless a black kid is aware of the Nguzo Saba and is utilizing ebonics as a way of identifying with the practice of kwanzaa, they have no genuine claim on the concept of ebonics. when you remove intention and awareness from what ebonics actually is, yr essentially left with an excuse for creative illiteracy. i'm all for creativity, but illiteracy is sure a shame.

OK, I edited my last post a lot, sorry.

I don't really think I was "dismissing their own language as irrelevant." I think you've kind of misunderstood what I did. I didn't come right out and tell them that their usage of Ebonics was unacceptable. I marked stuff wrong on their essays and then sometimes would talk to them later about what would have been better. Ebonics never actually came up, but the books we used had examples in them that were clearly modeled after ebonics and my classes would laugh at them because they recognized things in the wrong answers that they say all the time.

Anyway, I don't think we should have different SATs, that's too simple a solution.