A Sympathetic Reading for "Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator"

In "Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator," Lisa Delpit describes going through school and always her "Black English" corrected by her teachers and mother into "hypercorrect Standard English." She also talks about the way she was taught "'skills' and grammar" in her writing. These ways of teaching were not meaningful to her at all. Instead she preferred a method of learning to speak the correct way by speaking to others who spoke in that manner and prefered "writing in meaningful contexts" over learning the way she had been taught up until graduate school. It is certainly a lot easier to give a hands on approach to speaking and writing as apposed to sitting in a classroom and correcting grammar in a text book or being condemned for every 'ain't' or 'me' where an 'I' should be when you speak. Consistent sentences to correct, is sometimes a good form of learning, but with a more direct and meaningful approach, such as writing a short story, grammar can become a lot easier. The same goes for speaking. The author preferred a more "holistic" form of teaching where reading and writing are mixed together and focus was on the meaning and not just the form.