By Jiali Wang and Jazmin Cruz Interested in guest blogging for the National WRITE Center? See our guidelines by clicking here.
Guest Blogger: Alejandro Granados Vargas “Ain’t is not a word.” This is the mantra one of my teachers made us verbally repeat out loud in my early elementary years. Every repetition was supposed to burn it into our memories and turn it from a sentence into a law, akin to “water is wet” and “sugar is sweet”.
I remember her walking into the classroom. She was short with brown hair tied into a ponytail and she had a paper and pencil in her hand. She was wearing a green polo shirt and navy blue slacks, our school uniform. She was from another class and hadn’t done her homework. That’s why she was sent to our class. My school had a punitive system where students were sent to another class to write letters apologizing to their caregivers for not doing their homework. My teacher looked at her and gestured to the corner, pointing to the spot she needed to sit on to write her letter. “Can I have a pencil? Mine ain’t workin’,” she said to my teacher. My teacher looked at her as if she had just insulted her recently dead grandmother, took a bite into a lemon, or both. Without saying a word to the girl, she brusquely gestured the girl to come to the front of the class. “‘Ain’t’ is not a word. It’s ‘Mine does not work’,” she said, crouching to look into the girl’s eyes. The girl remained quiet, searching for a visual anchor besides my teacher’s stare, apparently unsure of what to say. My teacher grabbed the girl’s shoulders to square them in our direction. Slowly and rhythmically accenting each syllable in the way teachers do, she said, “Say ‘Ain’t is not a word’.” The girl muttered it under her breath, all the while looking down at her shoes. “Say it louder. ‘Ain’t…is…not…a…word’.” Although, indeed, the girl spoke the words louder, it would hardly be called “loud”. She found a visual anchor in her shoes and maintained her eye gaze at them as if the shame hadn’t trickled down to her feet yet. The teacher then turned her attention to us, with her hands still on the girl’s shoulders, trapping her in her public humiliation. “If you want to be good students and be successful one day, you have to speak correctly,” she said to us, scanning the room and making eye contact with each of us. “We are all going to say it together. ‘Ain’t is not a word’.” She had us repeat it all together, nodding her head to the tempo of each cutting syllable, etching the message into our minds deeper and deeper. We repeated it again. And again. And again. Ain’t is not a word. By Undraa Maamuujav and Jazmin Cruz Interested in guest blogging for the National WRITE Center? See our guidelines by clicking here.
By Jiali Wang and Jazmin Cruz Interested in guest blogging for the National WRITE Center? See our guidelines by clicking here.
By Jiali Wang and Jazmin Cruz Interested in guest blogging for the National WRITE Center? See our guidelines by clicking here.
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