"Why don't we respond to the Delpit article?"

1. If you are preparing to teach, what are you taking away from Delpit's article regarding language and power that might help you as a teacher, and how could you apply these ideas to your proposed level of teaching?

I am not planning to become a teacher, but I was unintentionally thinking about how this essay could help a teacher as I was reading it. I thought it was interesting when Delpit was talking about the different ways that students react to various styles of speaking. Depending on how direct the teacher is speaking to them, they may or may not feel like the teacher is really contributing anything to the class.

When I was in fourth or fifth grade, I can remember instances where the teacher would say something like, "Brandon, why don't we do the problem on the board?" I recognized that it was not really a question, and that "we" didn't actually mean that we would work together, so I typically went up to the board and completed the problem. Later in my school career, when I was asked a question like that I would think to myself, "I don't know what we want, but I don't want to do the problem," but I still understood that it wasn't really a question. I never thought that some people may not realize that it is a command in disguise, and that their learning may be affected by it.

I am a student who usually prefers teachers to to be more direct than they probably would like to be, so I found myself nodding in agreement to a lot of the examples present in the essay. It showed me that if I somehow end up teaching, I need to be aware of my style of speaking and how my students interpret it. Being direct and ridiculously indirect probably both have merit, but realizing when each is appropriate is the important part.