Several years ago, in my capacity as a consultant, I spent the summer tutoring a HIGH SCHOOL teacher in English.
She was taking a third-year correspondence course from BYU. This is in . . . uhm . . . 1988 or 1989. When she came to me, her dialect was Ebonics.
I sat with her every weekend that summer and held her hand through the parts of speech, grammar, noun forms, adjectives and adverbs, assorted clauses, sentence diagramming, and so forth. I worked diligently with her to bring her command of English up to the level of what I had mastered in the 7th grade.
She had to pass the course with at least a B- to get certified . . . to teach English that fall semester.
She passed the tests, and got a solid B+. I consider that one of my little triumphs in life. Years later I ran into her in a grocery store and she came over and gave me a hug.
Sadly, although she was now "certified" to teach English, her dialect was still a watered-down version of Ebonics. I pity those kids that depended on her to learn HIGH SCHOOL, SOPHOMORE ENGLISH based only on the fact that some guy who could pass muster on 3rd year college English using only what he'd learned in 7th grade had spent a summer holding her hand through a correspondence course.
And, years later, nearly every single teacher my kids had (once we put them back in the publik sistum) had somehow managed to pass college English without being able to speak it nor, in many cases, to write it.
Today, by people who read my publicly published work, I am considered "eloquent" and occasionally "erudite." I haven't the heart to tell any of them that my language and writing skills of today would barely pass muster at the 10th grade level where I went to school.
Now, if you really want writing talent, you should talk to my dad, the guy with the degree in General Semantics and a lifetime of technical writing. Oh, wait, you can't. He died last year at 91. What I do is a pale shadow of his art.
And now, here I am, Mrs. Vanderbundt's slacker student, all these years later lamenting the fact that my meager language skills eclipse those of the overwhelming majority of the modern teachers I've met.
We have indeed declined when that 1962 kid, two seats back in the third row, who stared out the window, who never did his homework, who somehow passed the tests and thus the class, can level criticism at the pathetic state of publik eddycashun, lo these fifty years hence.
Yeah. We're doomed. Doomed, I tells ya.
