This doesn't even come close to making sense.
Words only have the power we give them.
What you described is an authoritarian approach to teaching, which any teacher worth her/his pay learned NOT to do early in their career.
Requiring that people (that is what students are, very young PEOPLE) jump through a series of arbitrarily constructed hoops to justify the way THEIR COMMUNITY TAUGHT THEM TO COMMUNICATE is degrading. Why should thier dialect have to be justified? After all, what WE call standard American English is actually a DIALECT of English. This is why Brits don't speak the way we speak in the States.
It is a FAR better approach to accept their language, slang and all, and insist that it is IMPERATIVE for a black person to know how to communicate effectively in MOST situations, which requires the attainment of some level of fluency with the English language.
It is absolutely absurd to suggest that a language variant-that is what "black English" is- denotes something that has to be justified by the speaker.
Interacting with them the way you described would do nothing but sow discontent, and resentment. You have questioned the legitimacy of their way of communicating without just cause or provocation.
Being a teacher is like being a Viet Nam vet. A WHOLE lot of people claim to have been educators once upon a time. Few who make the claim were actually professionally trained and intellectually prepared for the job.
There are a WHOLE lot of substitute teachers masquerading as professionals. In Michigan, you can actually go to the Department of Education website and enter the names of teachers. If they are employed by a district in the state, their credentials will be listed. It will also show that a person is a substitute if said person is not professionally credentialed.
More than half of my colleagues were in some sort of half-assed alternative education program that allowed them a waiver to teach in lieu of actual teaching credentials. They were NOT professional, certified teachers.
I often referred to them as the "he be, she be, we be teachers", not because they used"black English" (I HATE that term), but because it was the ONLY dialect they knew how to use fluently.
There is (or SHOULD be) a difference between a sub with an emergency teaching cert, and a real, certified, professionally trained teacher.
By the way, many of the "non-black" students talk the way they do because they come from where they come from. Eminem does not speak the way he does because he is trying to sound black. He uses the dialect in which he was raised, which is predominant, even among white folks, in the metro Detroit area.
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Accurate.
