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It really is amazing the things you can accomplish when you least expect it. After reading Ramsey’s “Teaching the Teachers to Teach Black Dialect Writers”, I found Ramsey’s experiences to hold true to that notion. Ramsey is a professor and is asked to teach a group of grad-students with a black dialect how to speak Standard English, or in general how to speak well. Ramsey question whether or not this is a credible course and worth its weight, hoping students do not sign up. However much interest in the class results in his teaching of it for the semester where through trials and tribulations he and his students learn the importance of the class and how much they accomplished.
Ramsey starts off the school year with having the students do general article readings. He found that found class discussions however, is where most the learning took place. He used many tools to teach these students how to speak “correctly” with much haste. Particularly the discussion of analyzing scholarly articles were most effective. At the end of the day the students and Ramsey realized that being bi-dialect was key. They found that the students need to utilize both dialects in their everyday lives. Even after all the theories that they reviewed, there was one general consensus derived by the entire class, “My students quickly saw that there were many theories, some of them foolish, most of them untried, few of them proven. In short, there were no pat answers or fool-proof methods for teaching black dialect writers”( Ramsey 198).
The article went about discussing composition studies by showing Ramsey’s approach and methodology in teaching the class and analyzing overall dialects effect on writing. Ramsey and his students decided to make the class untheoritical oriented and more practically oriented. A great tool which they used was dissecting and analyzing dialect-writer's paper. This would help the students learn and see mistakes they made in their speech or writing. The class then started to develop the idea that the class was really about how to teach writing. Ramsey often found himself not teaching problems with the dialect writer, but errors that any normal college student would face in writing. The classes goal shifted to how to write in general. It had nothing to do with dialect, just the general fact of how to write.
Ramsey found that issue of whether or not these students wanted to learn Standard English was an issue, because they wanted to learn it. These students recognized that if they wanted to survive and function in the real world, you had to utilize this way of speaking and writing.
I found the fact that these students issue with speaking in writing is not because of their dialect, but because they have a problem with writing in general was very interesting. It makes sense to me. I feel that if teachers see a student struggling in writing and they are a minority, they automatically assume it is because they have a dialect, which is inaccurate . I think because of this notion, this article effectively make an argument about a role in composition studies .