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What is racist about expecting good grammar out of college students? I don't get it? How did race get involved?
We'd probably know that, if the OP posted an informative, unbiased analysis of the situation. Instead, we got a clearly one-sided article that does nothing but support his own agenda.
How do we even know they are black? UCLA is barely 2.5% black....I googled the story and every single story was posted on a racist website(Stormfront, Angry White Men, etc, etc). Clearly, this isn't huge news, but conservative white men who feel the need to attack other races, specifically blacks.
It does not matter what color the kids are. They should be taught proper English grammer.
It does not matter what color the kids are. They should be taught proper English grammer.
You sound rather naive. Tell me you don't actually believe this "bad grammar" story being sold by the professor, when these are graduate students at one of the nation's top universities. It's simply not likely that they ALL have issues with sentence structure and punctuation. The issue is obviously deeper than Mr. Rust is letting on.
The sooner these students realize that their ghetto gibberish will never be spoken in the board rooms of Fortune 500 companies, the better off they will be.
Correct. The professor was trying to help these kids learn language skills that will help them succeed in life.
Did anyone bother to read the article? Did anyone bother to pay attention to what was written and think about it? If you had read the article instead of just the headline and if you had thought about it, you would have discovered three things:
1.) "He claimed that some students accused him of “micro-aggression” for pointing out mistakes in grammar and punctuation."
Now, that is one reason for their protest. They saw his attention to detail as a way to bully them. It's ridiculous and idiotic to complain about this, but this complaint has nothing to do with linking a person's race to bad grammar. It simply has to do with bad grammar.
2.) Rust noted that another complaint arose regarding a conversation about race that took place among a couple of students in one class.
This is the complaint that centers around a discussion of race. It does not state that race and bad grammar are linked nor does it state that Rust was personally involved. It does, however, state that people complained about the race discussion that was had in class among students. Nothing more, nothing less. A discussion about race is always difficult - as can be seen on this forum as well.
Thus, these are two separate reasons for complaining about this professor: He is too strict when highlighting bad grammar and there was a discussion about race in his class that did not sit well with some students. This also leads us to point number three:
3.) The author of this article does exactly what Rust's colleagues lamented:
"Instead, as with almost all protests, participants tried to appeal to emotion in spreading their views rather than backing up their position with reason and fact."
This is what the author did as well. He took two separate reasons for protesting the professor and merged them into one with the clear intent to appeal to the emotions of readers too lazy to go beyond the headline.
This is recognized by most linguists, sociolinguists in particular, some of whom have studied AAVE extensively, like William Labov and Geneva Smitherman. It's analogous to Appalachian English--both dialects have their own internally consistent logics. In any case, many who are fluent in various dialects of English are capable of code-switching.
For anyone interested in a quick summary of what you'd learn in a linguistics class: This.
If you don't know your grammar by the time you reach college it's not worth correcting by a professor not actively teaching it. Grammar can be corrected, but it takes a lot of practice reading and writing, and it needs to be taught properly. I'd say the majority of teachers can't teach grammar properly, or in a way that it can easily be absorbed.
It's become so common to cry "racist" that most people now ignore it. Too bad these kids don't know that.
A University of California Los Angeles professor recently came under fire from a number of students for what they described as racist behavior. According to professor emeritus Val Rust, the entire controversy arose from his effort to instill in his students a higher grammar proficiency.
If you don't speak the King's English you aren't a real American.
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