The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.
At first I thought, given everything else that happend in Arizona this week, that this was a joke. It turns out to be true.
Please share widely!
these people are nuts. This law is so extreme, though, that it’s going to set a generation of latinos against the Republican Party, especially as other states follow Arizona’s lead (and it’s already happening — Oklahoma has an even crazier law coming up). Very, very soon in this country, latinos are going to be the majority of residents in many republican-leaning states. I have a funny feeling those states won’t be republican-leaning afterward.
I went to public schools where some of the teachers would pronounce “I told you” as “I tote chew” and I still got a decent education and went to college.
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p>And then in college half my math and physics professors had really, really thick accents.
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p>70% of AZ lege was elected with public financing, so…
Truly, Arizona is the meth lab of democracy.
Hilarious, yet tragic. “Heavily accented” would describe virtually every teacher I had at the old Peabody School in Cambridge. I remember with particular fondness the astonishing Boston accent of Mr. Colleary, whose “heavily accented” and occasionally “ungrammatical” outbursts delighted my brother and me, and are still part of our family lore.
…my physics teacher from high school needs to go. Man had the thickest Maine accent I’ve ever heard. Never knew where an R would show up. AreaR. PhenomenaR. AlphaR, betaR, and gammaR.
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p>I’ll miss Mr. Binnette. He was an excellent physics teacher, too. And had a great ear for comedy; introduced me to Leslie Phillips (among other things, he was the Voice of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter movies; before that he did excellent British comedy on stage and screen).
what “heavily accented English” really means, we really are seeing the ugly underbelly of racism up close and personal. One of my best friends is from Puerto Rico and speaks English with a serious accent. This woman has an M.S. in Biology from Loyola University and did research for years at Argonne National Labs–that’s right, the national laboratory. Guess she’s not fit for a public school classroom in Arizona.
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p>Excise Arizona from the body national like the tumor it is. I regret having spent my tourist dollars there during April vacation, the beauty of the Grand Canyon’s south rim notwithstanding. Ugh.
until the SJC just overruled: http://www.boston.com/news/loc…
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p>Although this is not for physics or Biology teachers, this is for teachers who teach children learning English.
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p>I was a Comp Sci major and I could barely understand most of my instructors. They were great CS instructors, but I am not sure I would want to use them if they were supposed to be teaching me English.