Uff da.

Uff da – an exclamation expressing baffelement, surprise, or dismay.

Uff da – my new favorite word that comes to mind when I hear composition teachers discuss “black English” in a frustrated manner.

Two weeks ago I was at CCCC’s, and oh my goodness was it great! It was so big, there were so many great presentations, and it was in my hometown. It was blissful….well until you heard some of these arcane ideas surface from practicing English teachers. And one of them directly related to Kynard and Royster’s pieces. While I was waiting in a sitting area on the third floor of the Marriott, I was surrounded by English teachers, and it was my nerd dream. But, this dream quickly was interrupted when I started ease-dropping (sorry it was an open space!) to two “veteran” English teachers discuss their adamant disregard for black vernacular and its presence not only at the conference but in the classroom.

Pieces like Kynard, Royster, and Vershuan Young’s remind us that our field still has lots of room to grow, and I really appreciated Kynard’s remarks about the “tightrope” act we have to use. She states that while acknowledging the structural racism facing African American masses, we need to create a space where they can share their language, while we also still teach the “marketplace skills” and rules of “cultures of powers”. But, unlike many authors she really focuses on the other side of the tightrope act and nudges us to focus on the “cultural, rhetorical principles, and linguistic philosophies that have shaped Africn American communities” (382). I appreciate that note to end on. While I see other fields like TESL and Linguistics doing great work in that field, I haven’t found as much work in composition and rhetoric, but that might be because I am not as connected as I wish.

…now back to the old cranky ladies.

While I wish I had courage to intervene, I did not. I kept listening to this conversation, which lasted about ten minutes and really was just a complaint fest. They went on to how they hated that graduates could present at CCCC’s (especially those master-level students who have only 1-2 years of teaching experience). GASP! What are these students thinking in trying to create a professional brand for themselves?! Uff da.

But somewhere during this really frustrating and annoying lobby that I was waiting in, I realized something. These are teachers frustrated. Simple as that. I wonder if they had been giving resources like Kynard’s about the importance of inviting other languages/cultures into the classroom, or what might happen if we invited a pedagogical challenge to include resources and activities we could use in our classroom to invite these underprivileged voices to the forefront? Would they have had different conversations with each other? I am not sure. I definitely don’t want to leave on a note of making them seem like the victims because they don’t have resources or justifying their rude remarks, because they were cranky old teachers, but I am trying to think about how we continue to move forward as a field.

How do we continue to get composition and writing teachers to move forward to the field and invite, with a more humanistic touch, these voices that are so often banished from our classrooms?