Good article I seen

Matt Amaral, Teach4Real - At the beginning of every school year, I immediately teach a lesson on using the word “seen.” Specifically, I inform students that the word “seen” should never immediately come after the word “I.” “‘I seen’ does not exist in the English language”, I tell them. “It exists in dialects of the English language, but not in Standard English” (I’ll let you decide for yourself if Standard English is just another dialect or in fact the Language itself).

Fast forward to today, the end of the first quarter, and anytime a student in one of my classes says “I seen,” as in, “I seen her smoking weed at the gas station across the street, that’s why she ain’t here,” that student immediately has 30 other kids yell, “YOU SAW!” It is glorious.

Here’s why it makes me so happy. It has nothing to do with getting my students to stop saying the phrase “I seen,” because they shouldn’t have to. They are being raised in a part of the world where everyone from their mother to their dear old grandmother says, “I seen you take the last sip of Hennessey,” and if they want to communicate at home and on the street they damn well better say things like, “I seen it!” Then everyone will understand what they are saying. But in my classroom I try to address this linguistic tendency in order to get my students to see the finer points about language and power, and the ability to switch dialects when the situation asks for it. They know using “I seen” is ghetto. They know that every time they use that phrase, they are using a ghetto dialect and tipping off the listener that they are from the ghetto. There’s nothing wrong with being from the ghetto (although there are plenty of sucky things about having to live there), but now, when my students go to lunch and hear their friends say “I seen”, they see them existing in a different way.

Look at it this way: the other 1,900 kids on campus say “I seen” with blissful ignorance. They have no idea the ramifications that phrase can have if used in front of the wrong audience. Those of us who are English nerds, business owners, bosses, managers, or recruiters will cringe and end an interview real quick upon hearing someone say, “I seen your ad online, that’s why I’m here,” unless of course you are looking for unskilled labor so you can pay them poverty wages (which unfortunately is just about everyone these days, so it kind of messes up my point), but you get my point.

So if you teach ghetto kids, which because of the inequality in this country is most of them, we need teachers who understand that what we are doing is adding to our students’ already sophisticated means of communication—not eliminating or replacing the way they speak. There is nothing wrong with the fact our students speak a dialect spoken by EVERYONE in their region (regiolect), social class (sociolect), or by others of their ethnicity (ethnolect) — you want to help them critically think about language, and create an awareness of how language and power intersect, and understand that their rhetorical skill is ultimately what will lead them to success in other neighborhoods, with people of other income levels and ethnicities.