I’ve posted before about how my children view gender neutral words such as “firefighter” or “police officer” as the norm. (Actually they don’t say “police officer” they say that someone is a “police,” and so do all their friends. Apparently, we’re in the process of creating a new noun.) Recently, I’ve noticed that my kids’ use of gender neutral language has gone beyond simply accepting gender neutral nouns. They insist on gender neutral pronouns as well.
Sometimes, when we’re driving home, I will complain about the other drivers. Maria will often ask, after she hears me mutter, what I just said. Not wanting to increase her vocabulary of taboo words, my usual response is:
“Oh, that car isn’t being safe.”
“Why?” she responds.
“Oh, maybe he’s just not paying attention,” I’ll say, not wanting her to think the world is full of crazy people.
“How do you know it’s a he?”
She catches me on it every time! I don’t know it’s a “he,” but apparently, I unconsciously use “he” as a generic pronoun. It’s nice to know that my 4 year old doesn’t have that unconscious bias toward male pronouns. For her, “he” is definitely male. And “she” is definitely female. When I respond, “Oh, they’re not paying attention,” she doesn’t bat an eye. Clearly “they” can be either male or female, singular or plural.
Equally heartening was Tommy’s response to the original text of Harry the Dirty Dog. We have an ancient copy of the book, printed in 1956. Last winter, Tommy was reading this book aloud to me as part of his evening reading homework. We got to the page of the book where Harry, having changed from a white dog with black spots to a black dog with white spots, was trying to convince his family that he was really Harry. After Harry had done all of his old tricks, the text reads: “Everyone shook his head and said ‘no, that couldn’t be Harry.’” Tommy stopped at that point and exclaimed
“His head?! It shouldn’t be “his”!”
“What should it be?” I asked.
“Their head,” he promptly replied. And then he thought for a moment, “Or his or her.”
Once again, clear evidence that for my children, “his” is not a generic pronoun, but a specific male one. “They” and “their” are the generic pronouns for my kids. At 7, Tommy recognizes that “his or her” is an option, but it’s definitely a less preferred option. Even so, ‘his or her’ is preferred over ‘his’ alone. Every time we read this book, he stops and complains about that pronoun!
The only reason that we were ‘supposed’ to use ‘his’ as a pronoun was because scholars tried to impose rules of mathematical logic to language. 'Every' is singular, and therefore 'should' have a singular pronoun associated with it. But in English, ‘his’ clearly has a male quality to it, one that my children recognize. ‘They’ on the other hand, because it’s plural, has the quality of ‘unspecified’ gender . If there is more than one, you don’t know if the people are male or female, or a combination of the two. So extending the plural pronoun to refer to a single person when you don't know the gender, is a natural extension. Using it to refer back to 'everyone' when the group is clearly a mixed group of males and females, also makes perfect sense. It’s nice to see the triumph of the function of language over so-called logic.
It was also nice to look up a modern rendition of the story and find that this page, after Harry has failed to convince his family of who he is, now reads “Everyone shook their head...” Sometimes publishers do indeed edit for the better!
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Monday, May 21, 2007
Line 9 Powell!
"Line 9 Powell!"
"Line 6 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard!"
We were standing at a bus stop, waiting for a bus, and as each bus passed by, Tommy would shout the number and the destination. This not what I had envisioned hearing as I thought about my son learning to read. The sentences I had envisioned were things like "The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play."or "I am a bunny." Nope, not for our son.
And yet, given that Tommy has never been terribly motivated to read story books, perhaps this is not surprising. He is, however, very motivated to glean information from things like the weather page or bus schedules. If it's information you want, he's the boy to know. We drove to a birthday party in another part of town this weekend. We exited on NE 122nd Ave. When Tommy saw the sign for the exit, he announced: "The 71 bus goes here." He was right, of course.
Tommy has long been interested in information. Nearly every morning since he was about 3, Tommy has read the weather page with breakfast. We started this tradition when we were trying to convince him to switch from long to short sleeves one spring. "It's supposed to be hot today, you might want to wear short sleeves." "Why?" "That's what it said on the weather page." "Let me see!" So we showed him. And with this, a whole new world opened up for Tommy. He'd always been a bit disturbed by the fact that the sun would mysteriously disappear behind the clouds. "When is it coming back?" he'd ask when he was 2. "I don't know," never really satisfied him. He has always liked to know what's coming next. The weather page helped him be able to predict where the sun was and what was coming next.
In addition, the weather page has been a great source of functional literacy skills for Tommy. He's learned the days of the week and to recognize them in print. He's learned to read the symbols on the page (sunny, rainy, cloudy). He's learned to read the city names. He's learned to locate Portland on the map. He's learned to locate other cities on the map as well. He can point to where Aunt Mary lives, or where Grandma & Grandpa S. live or where Grandma N. lives. He's learning to read bar graphs indicating the high and low temperatures or how much rainfall we've gotten compared to average. He's got a sense that 80 degrees Fahrenheit is warm and requires short sleeves and maybe even shorts!
And now he's entering a new phase of literacy, one step closer to reading. And that step has been brought about not by basal readers or phonics instruction but by bus schedules. Tommy's best friend at school rides the bus to school every day, and often brings bus schedules in for the other kids to see. That has created a collecting craze among the kindergarteners.
Bus schedules are all the rage – we have a collection of well over 50. Tommy and his friend bring them in to school. They carefully color the white letters with marker. Tommy traces the route on the inside - highlighting the major stops in yellow and the route in red. And through this all, he's somehow learned to read all of the names of the streets and routes that the buses go on. Last night we were talking about the Number 12 bus. He announced "It's the boulevard bus. It goes down Sandy Boulevard and Barbur Boulevard." He's even progressed to making jokes about the names - saying "Marthin Luter King Jr. Boulevard". He's proud of the fact that he knows the difference between "t" and "th" and highly amused by the reversal.
As with everything, it's good to remember that there's more than one route into literacy. Some kids go the traditional route through story books. Others take the bus.
"Line 6 Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard!"
We were standing at a bus stop, waiting for a bus, and as each bus passed by, Tommy would shout the number and the destination. This not what I had envisioned hearing as I thought about my son learning to read. The sentences I had envisioned were things like "The sun did not shine, it was too wet to play."or "I am a bunny." Nope, not for our son.
And yet, given that Tommy has never been terribly motivated to read story books, perhaps this is not surprising. He is, however, very motivated to glean information from things like the weather page or bus schedules. If it's information you want, he's the boy to know. We drove to a birthday party in another part of town this weekend. We exited on NE 122nd Ave. When Tommy saw the sign for the exit, he announced: "The 71 bus goes here." He was right, of course.
Tommy has long been interested in information. Nearly every morning since he was about 3, Tommy has read the weather page with breakfast. We started this tradition when we were trying to convince him to switch from long to short sleeves one spring. "It's supposed to be hot today, you might want to wear short sleeves." "Why?" "That's what it said on the weather page." "Let me see!" So we showed him. And with this, a whole new world opened up for Tommy. He'd always been a bit disturbed by the fact that the sun would mysteriously disappear behind the clouds. "When is it coming back?" he'd ask when he was 2. "I don't know," never really satisfied him. He has always liked to know what's coming next. The weather page helped him be able to predict where the sun was and what was coming next.
In addition, the weather page has been a great source of functional literacy skills for Tommy. He's learned the days of the week and to recognize them in print. He's learned to read the symbols on the page (sunny, rainy, cloudy). He's learned to read the city names. He's learned to locate Portland on the map. He's learned to locate other cities on the map as well. He can point to where Aunt Mary lives, or where Grandma & Grandpa S. live or where Grandma N. lives. He's learning to read bar graphs indicating the high and low temperatures or how much rainfall we've gotten compared to average. He's got a sense that 80 degrees Fahrenheit is warm and requires short sleeves and maybe even shorts!
And now he's entering a new phase of literacy, one step closer to reading. And that step has been brought about not by basal readers or phonics instruction but by bus schedules. Tommy's best friend at school rides the bus to school every day, and often brings bus schedules in for the other kids to see. That has created a collecting craze among the kindergarteners.
Bus schedules are all the rage – we have a collection of well over 50. Tommy and his friend bring them in to school. They carefully color the white letters with marker. Tommy traces the route on the inside - highlighting the major stops in yellow and the route in red. And through this all, he's somehow learned to read all of the names of the streets and routes that the buses go on. Last night we were talking about the Number 12 bus. He announced "It's the boulevard bus. It goes down Sandy Boulevard and Barbur Boulevard." He's even progressed to making jokes about the names - saying "Marthin Luter King Jr. Boulevard". He's proud of the fact that he knows the difference between "t" and "th" and highly amused by the reversal.
As with everything, it's good to remember that there's more than one route into literacy. Some kids go the traditional route through story books. Others take the bus.
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