Upward Over The Mountian

Because I have been on an absolute emotional rollercoaster lately I have been listening to some kind of depressing music ha, but with that in mind, I came across a song I used to listen to all the time called “upwards over the mountain,” by Iron and Wine. In keeping with the motif of beautiful language in this blog, the lyrics come to mind from the song, “ So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten Sons are like birds, flying upward over the mountain,” “Mother don't worry, I killed the last snake that lived in the creek bed Mother don't worry, I've got some money I saved for the weekend Mother remember being so stern with that girl who was with me? Mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body? The imagery in these lyrics is just beautiful, but then I think about what they really mean to me. As I dig through my bank of memories all I can think about is this song playing in the car as my mother drove me to college for the first time. I can see her now, crying listening to this song in the car. We were leaving Buffalo and it was a perfect sunset and I was leaving home to a place I’d never been starting basically a new life. The lyrics hit me. They are all about a boy trying to prove that he’ll be ok to his mom. Words and beautiful language speaks to us. We store sentences in our internal dictionaries and are reminded of the phrases, or lyrics in this case, as a sentiment of the moment. Forever I’ll be connected to this song and see my moms face each time I hear the song and remember the words.  

Beautiful Language

I have spent far too much time lately thinking about how much language and grammar usage is ridiculous, and I have been getting discouraged to even want to teach English, and then I realized something important. I love language. I want to teach to help kids first, but I really love English specifically because I love beautiful language. I am not talking about the academic pretentious language, which is implored by far too many people that I know, I am talking about the imagery and emotion that words can give. Because I have been so stressed out lately with the events of life, I of course turn to music and have been listening to a new album by the band Bon Iver. The music alone evokes such a strong emotion in me, but what really catches me is Bon Iver’s imagery in his lyrics. He, (Justin Vernon who is Bon Iver) writes songs about emotions that everyone has. The lyrics are simple and beautiful and true, just like poetry I want to teach someday. And, as I got listening to the songs it hit me that the emotions being sung about were emotions of anguish and pain. Some of the songs spread a general felicity but the songs about deep and sad emotions affected me the most.  There was a lyric, “I was not magnificent.” The lyric with the music was so powerful.  But the words on their own, for whatever reason really hit me. They are so almost morbidly beautiful. I got thinking about a certain correlation with beautifulness relating to inner emotions and language as a means for snapshoting said emotion. In another song he sings, “Pincher with the skin inside. You pinned me with your black sphere eyes. You know that all the ropes sometimes. I was only for to die beside.” Why do these images and emotions hit so hard? I think there is a definite correlation between our own emotions, the music we listen to, and how we process emotion. In essence scenes that we connect with are scenes that we can’t articulate ourselves. I am not depressed or anything, I just enjoy a darker side of emotion with a beautiful tone through beautiful images. I find Bon Iver’s music appealing because his language tells a story and makes me consider my own life and my own emotions - Something I want my students to do someday.

Short Paper Draft #2

Frank DiMaria

Short Paper Grammar

                                          “Equate rhyme with reason, Sun with season”

According to Shiv Raj Desai and Marsh Tyson, spoken word poetry is “a form of poetry that utilizes the strengths of our communities: oral tradition, call-and-response, home languages, storytelling and resistance. Spoken word poetry is usually performed for an audience and must be heard.” I think of poets like Saul Williams, or rapper Common, who implore such techniques through their art. Lines like, “We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue/Statements, such as, “keep it real", especially when punctuating or anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically/or physically or depicting an unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as retro-active/and not representative of the individually determined is,” can be heard in Saul Williams’ Coded Language. The lines tell a story and are barbaric yelps crying out for a place to be heard. Williams demonstrates the African American English language and implores a code switching technique to reach a level of comfortableness in expressing feeling. If I showed my students Williams’ poetry and had them write their own to present, I would not only be embracing who my students are, creating a student centered environment, but I would be also teaching them that there is a place for them to be whom they are and what they want to be.

What does this look like in a classroom? Well, first off I would show my students some videos of spoken word poets performing to help my students start seeing what spoken word actually looks like. I would want my students to see the emotion and language that the poets are using as a model for my students to start writing their own poetry. Then I could start out my lesson/writing workshop with a simple question to my class - “what do you all wonder?” I want my students to look at the world and ask questions and figure out essentially why things are they way they are in the world. Students could come up with a list of questions that they have about the world like, “why do good things come to those who wait,” or “why must people die,” or “what will I do when I am older.” Letting students generate these kinds of questions serves as a good prompt for writing poetry. I have always found that writing poetry is a response to my own personal questions about the world and it might be a way for my students to do the same. I would have my students initially answer the questions they came up with in as many ways as possible then have them turn those answers into spoken word poetry. I would encourage my students to put expressive language into their poetry - words that really “come off” the page, writing to convey meaning. I would strongly encourage my students to also use whatever dialect/language they deem appropriate and comfortable. This is not to say I would say, “use Ebonics only.” I would simply encourage a level of comfortably. If it’s Spanish English or Ebonics/African American English is fine by me. What I care about is that my students are learning to play with language and learn to articulate their own ideas, feelings, and memories.  Another prompt I could use is to ask my students to think about an experience, either really good or really bad, and start writing down all the emotions that they can remember they had during the experience. Then write down various instances or scenes they can remember from the experience and weave in emotions while describing the experience. Through editing and rewriting, students will be able to produce a powerful poem about a personal memory that they had.

            After students wrote their poetry I would have them perform their poems, as after all, spoken word is a form of poetry that needs to come alive through performance. I could set up my classroom like a theater and have my students recite their poems over songs or movies in the background and create a true poets café atmosphere in the room. Students could explain their poem after they read it to give insight to their thinking process and take ownership for their work.

If students opened up through this method, “this proves to be an opportunity to understand the context in which our students are coming from. Once we can familiarize ourselves with the struggles our students grapple with internally, both in and outside of school, we can connect with them on a more human, personal level. More importantly, by simply listening to our students and creating a space where they can begin to articulate their thoughts and ideas in written and spoken form, we can further assist them in developing a love for written and spoken word.” My goal as a teacher must, and will be to truly listen to my students. Spoken word poetry not only allows students to write, speak, and perform in a comfortable way, it also allows me, the educator, to understand a different culture, a different language, and who my students are and can be inside and out of the classroom.

Desai, Shiv Raj, and Tyson Marsh. "Weaving Multiple Dialects in the Classroom Discourse: Poetry and Spoken Word as a Critical Teaching Tool." Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education 9.2 (2005): 71-90. ERIC. EBSCO. Web. 13 Sept. 2011.

Continuation of Agravation

So, after editing my girlfriend’s paper, she said to me, “did you edit it like a crazy English teacher?” I said I edited it and inquired why she wanted me to be so thorough with checking for grammar mistakes. She told me that he teacher deducts a half letter grade for each mistake. I was appalled to hear this, even being the sometimes-crazy English teacher I am. But I am not a “crazy English teacher” about grammar usage and I never will be. I am a crazy English teaching with stressing the importance of emotion and feeling within the classroom. I have talked about this idea in other blogs, but now that I am in this Grammar for Everyone class, I am becoming more and more aware of how much crap it really is to care so much about something that shouldn’t take precedence in the classroom. My girlfriend’s teacher probably had a strict teacher previously and is now taking it out on his students. Students don’t need to learn grammar rules. Students need to learn how to know that they matter and that their opinion counts.

Short Paper 1st draft

Frank DiMaria

Grammar For Everyone

                         “Equate rhyme with reason, Sun with season”

As I begin my professional career as a teacher, I contemplate all the facets of what it actually means to be a teacher in a classroom. While a wide variety of ideas jump into my mind immediately, the one that sticks out the most is making a connection with my students and forming relationships with them - showing them I care. With this in mind, first things first, I need to be able to communicate with my students, and not only communicate with them but understand their “home language.”

I’ll confront the reality head on in saying I come from a predominantly white, upper middle class suburban center. The idea of bilingual education, or even hearing Ebonics in the classroom was not on my mind at all starting off as a teacher. But, now as I move along in my career, I am interested and aware of the discussions in education revolving these terms, and the dire need for me as a future teacher in New York, a multicultural epicenter, to embrace and incorporate my students home language in my own classroom. In The Skin We Speak, Judith Barker offers, “Home English or dialect, which most students learn at home, and recent immigrants often from peers, and which for first and second generation immigrants may be a combination of English and their mother tongue.” Essentially, a home language or dialect can best be understood as the language a person most feels comfortable using. For the sake of this conversation, I want to look at Ebonics or African American English, specifically to examine how some teachers feel about embracing it in a classroom and then address using spoken word poetry as a way of doing so.

Erin J. Quinn offers the insight that, “Many African American students, particularly those residing in large urban centers, are speakers of African American English (AAE), a linguistically rich, rule-governed variety of English that contributes in part to the cultural identity of individuals in the African American community.” In the New York City classroom I’ll be teaching in soon, a predominantly urban area, I can expect to have African American students in my class. Though I personally cannot understand what it means to be an African American, I can at least embrace a home language in my classroom that an African American student may be comfortable with. Lisa Delpit says, “All people have the right to their own language. We cannot constantly correct children and expect them to continue to want to talk like us.” (32) I cannot expect my students to change whom they are, a home language being part of their construct, to appease a façade of what “standard English dialect” sounds like.

If I truly want to embrace who my students are, I cannot correct a student for using a home language or code switching. Instead I need to embrace and respect what they are doing as it would help them to become more comfortable with the classroom setting. Delpit offers an interesting point to consider in this conversation, “The even deeper secret was that even those of us who had acquired the “standard dialect” still loved and used aspects of Ebonics all the time.” Even if I taught my students that “standard dialect” was correct, they would still want to use and have the need for Ebonics anyways. Why not incorporate Ebonics into the classroom and embrace the idea? As Delpit makes more clearly, “Student don’t identify with the teachers who question their intelligence or with a curriculum that ignores their existence.” If I am constantly telling my students that their home language, the language of comfort, is wrong, I will never be able to connect with my students.

I consider Barker’s words strongly; “I begin by building upon a firm respect for each students home language - languages which, after all, are what most of us need to express connection and affection with friends and family, and what we draw upon for much of our art and cultural expression.” In teaching, teachers are faced with the challenge to develop a curriculum that is truly student centered. So, how do I make my classroom student centered while embracing home dialect and Ebonics? Ebonics is a language based in tradition of rhythm and sound and expressive movement. It reflects ethnic celebration and becomes an art form if truly listened to. There is a stereotype that exists which deems Ebonics as unfit and “non-standard,” and some teachers argue there is no place for it in the classroom let alone the real world. I could not disagree more to the idea of Ebonics not having a place in the classroom, and if looked at with an open mind, Ebonics is in essence poetry. All the attributes of African American English reflect that of a lively, emotionally driven, well written poem - Spoken Word.

According to Shiv Raj Desai and Marsh Tyson, spoken word poetry is “a form of poetry that utilizes the strengths of our communities: oral tradition, call-and-response, home languages, storytelling and resistance. Spoken word poetry is usually performed for an audience and must be heard.” I think of poets like Saul Williams, or rapper Common, who implore such techniques through their art. Lines like, “We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue/Statements, such as, “keep it real", especially when punctuating or anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically/or physically or depicting an unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as retro-active/and not representative of the individually determined is,” can be heard in Saul Williams’ Coded Language. The lines tell a story and are barbaric yelps crying out for a place to be heard. Williams demonstrates the African American English language and implores a code switching technique to reach a level of comfortableness in expressing feeling. If I showed my students Williams’ poetry and had them write their own to present, I would not only be embracing who my students are, creating a student centered environment, but I would be also teaching them that there is a place for them to be whom they are and what they want to be.

If students opened up through this method, “this proves to be an opportunity to understand the context in which our students are coming from. Once we can familiarize ourselves with the struggles our students grapple with internally, both in and outside of school, we can connect with them on a more human, personal level. More importantly, by simply listening to our students and creating a space where they can begin to articulate their thoughts and ideas in written and spoken form, we can further assist them in developing a love for written and spoken word.” My goal as a teacher must, and will be to truly listen to my students. Spoken word poetry not only allows students to write, speak, and perform in a comfortable way, it also allows me, the educator, to understand a different culture, a different language, and who my students are and can be inside and out of the classroom.

Works Cited

Delpit, Lisa D., and Joanne Kilgour. Dowdy. The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom. New York: New, 2008. Print. PGS. 31-59. Barker, Judith.

Desai, Shiv Raj, and Tyson Marsh. "Weaving Multiple Dialects in the Classroom Discourse: Poetry and Spoken Word as a Critical Teaching Tool." Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education 9.2 (2005): 71-90. ERIC. EBSCO. Web. 13 Sept. 2011.

Erin J. Quinn, et al. "African American English-Speaking Students: An Examination of the Relationship between Dialect Shifting and Reading Outcomes." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 52.4 (2009): 839-855. ERIC. EBSCO. Web. 13 Sept. 2011.

In My Travels

So, in my wonderful excursions to all that is downtown Fredonia, I came across this wonderful piece of street art I feel that I must share. I was initially struck with the images wonderful artistic value and questioned why such a piece wouldn't be in a place like Allbright? The image we see here is to be found on a "garage" behind EBC. I thought to myself, how drunk was the graffiti artist that painted this? Sure it's funny and all but it's so disrespectful. I mean on principal alone this really sucks for the homeowner, but if someone is really going to go out of their way to risk getting into trouble to graffiti, do you think they could at least spell garage right? Ok, so maybe I am being too hypercritical/correct, but I mean come on now . . . can you imagine going back to the site you just graffitied, thinking you were "the bomb" the night before and realizing you spelled "garage" wrong? Sure, I see what the artist was trying to do, "situational irony" maybe for less of a better term, but come on people! - G-A-R-A-G-E. Next time you decide to spray paint something, make sure your spelling is correct. Jokes on you.  Thank you Spell Check Incompetent Street Monet.  Just wanted to share.

Short Paper Proposal

Short Paper Proposal

Frank DiMaria

For my short paper I would like to investigate various “home” dialects that students would use within a classroom, and also investigate how teachers view allowing students to use their own home language within the classroom. I would like to ask questions like, what are considered home dialects? How do these dialects differ between at risk students and higher income school districts? And what are the various educational views concerning allowing or rejecting a students home language within the classroom. I will start my investigation by doing some Internet research on the topic, and I will also contact a friend who is a speech and English teacher for at risk students in Buffalo.

Working Bibliography

The Skin We Speak, Lisa Delpit. 

Mrs. Reiser, speech/English teacher.