What we notice about someone else’s language is less to do with language itself than with our perception of the person’s social status. This happens with kids in classrooms too, where teachers police the language of students with lower social status, while students with higher social status can say the exact same thing and nobody notices. This double standard can lead to Black students and bilingual students of color in particular being put into remedial classes that aren’t meant for them, preventing them from progressing academically. Nelson Flores wants an education system – and a world – that does justice to the many valid ways people use language.
Tag: language
Chronic pain is pain that lasts for months, years or even a lifetime, and doctors have a hard time understanding it. Not only is it sometimes impossible to cure, but doctors also tend to fixate on bodily pain and not address the ways pain is also psychological and emotional. In fact, Travis Chi Wing Lau argues that this attitude goes back to the ways doctors have been trained since the eighteenth century to observe outer bodily symptoms and discount patients’ subjective experiences. Turning to Travis’s poetry, we discuss why we need poets as well as doctors to understand pain.