Sunday, March 30, 2008

Don McLeroy & "Crazy Chinese Words"


(photo: tfn.org)

The Texas State Board of Education recently issued a recommended reading list, which has been criticized for lacking diversity: Educators rip book list in English plan.

A draft of the curriculum, released Wednesday, includes more than 150 literary works that Texas public school teachers should consider using for their courses. Only four of them reflect the Hispanic culture, a woefully low figure they fear will limit the exposure of the state's 4.7 million schoolchildren to cultural diversity.


When confronted with criticisms, Board Chair Don McLeroy, who responded by saying:
"What good does it do to put a Chinese story in an English book?" he said. "You learn all these Chinese words, OK. That's not going to help you master... English. So you really don't want Chinese books with a bunch of crazy Chinese words in them. Why should you take a child's time trying to learn a word that they'll never ever use again?"

He added that some words -- such as chow mein -- might be useful.
Not if the child decides to get a tattoo later on, Don. Or the child might become U. S. Secretary of State, quotes what he/she thought was a Chinese proverb, and get his/her's ass laughed at by those "crazy Chinese" as well as late night comedy show host. All because he/she never read "those Chinese books with a bunch of crazy Chinese words in them".

If you would like to add your thoughts & comments about this matter, Mr. McLeroy's contact information is available at Texas State Board of Education website. It might helpful to drop a few "crazy Chinese words" like 閉門造車 in your comments.

11 comments:

  1. First of all, McLeroy's bio indicates that he's trained as a dentist. Which brings to mind that ditty from "Little Shop of Horrors":

    You'll be a dentist,
    You have a talent for causing great pain!
    You'll be a dentist,
    People will pay you to be inhumane.


    Secondly, what book is he talking about in that proposed curriculum, The Joy Luck Club? So, let me see if I get this: Jane Austen writing on about barouches, hahas, and entailed estates presents fewer irrelevant vocabulary words to some kid in Amarillo? Sigh.

    It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an ignoramus in possession of a ten-gallon hat, must be in want of nine-and-a-half gallons.

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  2. From the story:

    A draft of the curriculum, released Wednesday, includes more than 150 literary works that Texas public school teachers should consider using for their courses. Only four of them reflect the Hispanic culture, a woefully low figure they fear will limit the exposure of the state's 4.7 million schoolchildren to cultural diversity.

    Er, this is Texas. If they wanted to introduce their students to cultural diversity, shouldn't they be adding in stories about the lives of granola-crunchers in Vermont and the Pacific Northwest?

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  3. I wrote him an email! I signed it

    My Name
    MA Candidate, My University, Japanese Studies
    You know, where we use "crazy" Japanese words 君のようなアメリカ人が我々の話が分からないために

    And yeah, I used kimi to be rude.

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  4. I'm pretty sure he was using the example of "chinese stories with crazy chinese words" to explain why he thought there needn't be many hispanic stories with spanish vocabulary in them; not because there's chinese lit in the curriculum. Something along the lines of 'learning spanish vocabulary would be as useless as learning chinese vocabulary'. (I don't agree with that, I'm just doing the Devil's Advocate thing.)

    His objections based on vocabulary are pretty weird. Sure, it's a part of what students do in English class. But there's also analysis of character development, plot, setting, etc. An English story in a hispanic setting (or even a chinese or japanese one) could just as easily be used to those ends. It could even have beneficial English vocabulary in it, despite it being set in a hispanic/chinese/japanese culture.

    School board folks can be bloody strange.

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  5. 君のようなアメリカ人が我々の話が分からないために

    Well said Stellanoctis.

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  6. Geez, what a hick. What happened to the olden days when an English speaker wasn't considered educated unless they knew French and German, plus the "dead" languages of Latin and classical Greek on top of that? It's idiotic to assume that that being a polyglot, even if you don't use all of those languages on a daily basis, is a waste of time.

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  7. Not to mention the fact that many words in English come from those "crazy words" of other languages.

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  8. Props to Jen for the Jane Austen comment by the way. Victorian England might as well be on another planet, to the average kid these days (except for late teens/early 20s girls going through the Austen fangirl phase).

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  9. Jen & Xenobiologista,

    I too have sampled some of Jane Austen's finest works, ie. pride & prejudice. Who would forget Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy walking around in a wet white shirt after taking an impromptu dip in the pond?

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  10. Slight digression but...

    "What happened to the olden days when an English speaker wasn't considered educated unless they knew French and German, plus the "dead" languages of Latin and classical Greek on top of that?"

    I was discussing something along those lines with my boyfriend recently, and we agreed that most aristocratic folk who had to study all those languages were probably not actually fluent in all of them.

    They might be fairly fluent in one, conversational in one or two others, and have a passing knowledge of the classics, enough to make it sound like they really knew them. But even without having to work for a living, one would have to be uncommonly intelligent to be fluent in four non-native languages that they don't use often.

    Or maybe I'm projecting. Having to put in four hours a day studying Chinese just to progress, and not even fluent yet...

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  11. Mmmm... Apparently, this person does not know that The Joy Luck Club was originally written in English. The Chinese words are part of the book's description of the culture it tries to portray. What's next, calling Lolita the greatest Russian novel because Nobokov wrote it... in English?!?!? Or maybe French for it's liberal use of French quotations?

    I'm from Texas and it's guys like this part of the reason our state ranks so low in education.

    The other reason is the fact that Connecticut is trying to pin G. W. Bush on us when everyone knows he was born in New Haven!

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