"As rhetoric, this sort of attitude works only in sermons to the Choir, and as pedagogy it's just disastrous." - Victor Ganata

"The reality is that an average U.S. student is going to go to the trouble of mastering the difficult conventions of SWE only if he sees SWE's relevant Group or Discourse Community as one he'd like to be part of." - Victor Ganata

"And in the absence of any sort of argument for why the correct-SWE Group is a good or desirable one (an argument that, recall, the traditional teacher hasn't given, because he's such a dogmatic SNOOT he sees no need to), the student is going to be reduced to evaluating the desirability of the SWE Group based on the one obvious member of the Group he's encountered, namely the SNOOTy teacher himself." - Victor Ganata

"What I am suggesting is that the rhetorical situation of an English class — a class composed wholly of young people whose Group identity is rooted in defiance of Adult-Establishment values, plus also composed partly of minorities whose primary dialects are different from SWE — requires the teacher to come up with overt, honest, compelling arguments for why SWE is a dialect worth learning." - Victor Ganata

"These arguments are hard to make — not intellectually but emotionally, politically. Because they are baldly elitist. The real truth, of course, is that SWE is the dialect of the American elite. That it was invented, codified, and promulgated by Privileged WASP Males and is perpetuated as "Standard" by same. That it is the shibboleth of the Establishment and an instrument of political power and class division and racial discrimination and all manner of social inequity." - Victor Ganata

"These are shall we say rather delicate subjects to bring up in an English class, especially in the service of a pro-SWE argument, and extra-especially if you yourself are both a Privileged WASP Male and the Teacher and thus pretty much a walking symbol of the Adult Establishment." - Victor Ganata

"This reviewer's opinion, though, is that both students and SWE are better served if the teacher makes his premises explicit, licit and his argument overt, presenting himself as an advocate of SWE's utility rather than as a prophet of its innate superiority." - Victor Ganata

As a Spanish and Korean language learner, I can get behind this as I've been dealing with it a lot. As a writer, however, a standard will never be the best way to convey certain emotions or even mark realistic characters. - Anika