Gee Whiz

When I was in graduate school at UT-Austin, I took sociolinguistics from Ian Hancock, a famed linguist and polyglot. As a Roma child, he traveled all over eastern Europe and then western Europe with his clan; at age 17 he walked into the U of London and plopped down the first English/Roma dictionary. On the basis of that work alone, he was awarded a doctorate degree.

Dr. Hancock was a kind of Professor Higginson, you know the character in My Fair Lady, who could discern where someone was from just from hearing that person speak a line or two. Dr. Hancock could go Prof Higginson one better: he could tell everywhere you were from—the migrations of your life—from just having you read one sentence. (I don't remember the sentence but it's one that commonly used by phonologists—it's chock full of vowel sounds and other telltale phonemes that are pronounced distinctly different in regional varieties of English, here and abroad. As our final exam, we had to listen and read different speakers and identify where they were from.)

The first day of class Dr. Hancock showed us that his reputation was well deserved. Going around the table, he had each of us read the sentence and then he told us where we had lived from birth to adulthood (in adulthood, our accents become less malleable, so he only claimed accuracy up to about age 20). I sat there smugly, just knowing that my migratory life would throw him off.

My turn came. I read the sentence. And without even a pause, Dr. Hancock correctly identified that I had spent early childhood up until about age 5 about 50 miles south of Boston, with a bit of Maryland/DC area throw in there somewhere, then moved to the northeast corner of Arkansas for about 3 – 4 yrs, (about ages 5-8) moved back to Massachusetts, and then finally down to the Houston area when I was about 12, where I came of age.

He was off in just one detail: I moved to Houston when I was 11, not 12. All other details were stunningly accurate.

I thought of Dr. Hancock as I read Gee and his analysis of the two students: Jennie (who did the pretend story) and Leona (who told the "rambling" story about her grandmother eating cakes). Their discursive practices—as do ours—tell the stories of their lives, or at least their own distinctive "ways with words." Gee's examples highlight how these two girls' family lives initiated them and socialized them differently in certain patterns of language use. What Gee doesn't emphasize (but would also agree with) is that these two girls can continue to expand their discursive practices if and when they are exposed to other "ways with words." But notice how the teacher misunderstood and devalued Leona's story as "rambling," failing to recognize the rich expressive tradition from which her storytelling principles draw.

While I do agree with Gee that one's ways with words reflect and constitute the values of one's identity group (the reason, in fact, these distinctive expressive traditions survive and even flourish), he goes too far in his analysis of what the cake story meant (bottom, p. 33), which is a curious little structuralist reading we used to do in 1970s. Just had to get that in.

A couple of things Gee leaves unexplained or under elaborated on. One is his point about using "popular culture" (which he puts in quotes). And the other re: making schools less alienating by making learning more like simulation video games. In both regards, he doesn't specify HOW. I went to a Gee panel at NCTE a couple of years back that was focused on that glaring omission. Gee spoke first, showed us his avatar (a half-female/half-asexual priestess—yes, he said high "priestess"), and said he intentionally did not specify how schools could apply these principles, in part because there are countless possibilities and in part because he trusted the imagination and intelligence of individual teachers to create these new possibilities in their classroom. The next two speakers—one a ninth-grade English teacher and the other an 8th grade science teacher—did just that. The science teacher explained how the hurricane seasons lead to an absolutely amazing extended unit based initially on tracking these storms but leading to all kinds of other questions that students generated and investigated. The English teacher was less successful in teaching Great Expectations in what she thought was a new way: pairing it with a young adult lit title (I forget what it was)... after which she still had students slogged through GE the same old way. Several teachers in the audience (quite rudely) called her out on that... and when it turned into a pile-on, Gee intervened and graciously and generously praised the profession for bringing these issues to the forefront (something like that). That quelled the mob who then put down their torches and nooses.

So how do we at college level create less alienating classrooms? That's the issue we'll be focusing on over the next 3 weeks.