Re: denny's

[Katha Pollitt <kpollitt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kelley, you seem to consider as structurally racist-sexist or classist
almost all the usual criteria for making judgments about students: you
don't like admitting kids by using test scores (or grades,either, I'm
assuming) or participation in extracurricular activities (there go
athletic scholarships!), you don't think they should know or be taught
mastery of standard English in speech or writing. So since a college
can't admit everyone who applies, how DO you think it should go about
choosing the freshman class?  The same criticism -- that some kids get a
veiled class advantage -- will be true of work portfolios, reference
letters, interviews.
  first come first serve? Flip a coin?
  And if mastery of standard English and the transmission of cultural
capital are not valid functions of education, what is?

ps.  Capitalization is not some arbitrary unecessary rule.  It's a
grammatical cue, like punctuation, and a visual marker that makes it
easier to read a page of print quickly and keep your place or find it
again if you lose it. A page of uncapitalized prose is MUCH harder to
read than a page with capitals in the standard places. Try it!

As for the argument that handicapped people may find conventional
spelling etc an extra effort they shouldn't be expected to make because
that's "ableism" -- I've seen fantastic amounts of bad spelling, poor
grammar, weird capitalization and unproofread prose in my life as a
teacher and editor.  No one was handicapped. They just hadn't been
taught, or were lazy, or didn't care. I had one student who told me she
was dyslexic, but specifically asked NOT to have special consideration
for that, and one student who was totally deaf but wrote very good
standard english. I think this handicapped supposition is a red herring.

  My daughter has had several teachers who couldn't spell and used bad
grammar ("could have went" "you really payed attention").  Looking at
schools for her I've hardly been in a classroom that didn't have a
pretty flagrant example of language misuse up on the wall in the
teacher's handwriting ("heroin" for "heroine," "petrid dish" for "petri
dish" etc). Many of the communications I've received from her schools
have had typos, usage mistakes, mispellings.
  You have no problem with any of that, Kelley? Really?

Katha