Post 1: Individualizing Communication

So my mom is a teacher for special education children in high school, and always takes a particular interest in one of her students Anne. She says that Anne is very bright, and if she could just read or write she could easily get into a university. I have trouble wrapping my brain around this idea as Anne has little to no motor and vocal skills, and it seems obvious to me that she must be able to read and write to be successful at a collegiate level. I have always defaulted to the fact that she just couldn’t be that intelligent, even given the circumstances its simply impossible. But here is where I am in insensitive, unconsciously ableist, and just blatantly wrong. We tend to judge intelligence on the scale of standard language. As stated in Should Writers use their own English, we often determine how bright one is by seeing how closely they can resemble the dominant language ideology. But in Anne’s case and many others, this form of communication is just not an adequate test of their intelligence. We could have plenty of smart folks if we stopped judging based on standard language. As a society we often dismiss other forms of English as slang or hood talk, with a preconceived notation that those who speak in this way are unable to learn “proper” English. But what actually makes it proper? No one would call French a dumb language, no, we admire its beauty. But when it comes to ethnic groups within America, our society often neglects other dialects, and frankly, this is rooted in racism. The proper English speakers argue that we must all learn one common language to communicate, but why does it have to be theirs? Why can’t we all learn to be bilingual to a sense? This is true in Anne’s case too. Although she cannot communicate in a vocal, who says that she has not created her own. And wow, creating her own language, that’s more than most of us can say we have done in our lifetimes.