“tool of thepatriarchy.” It is a tool for anyone who wishes to use it, and who is willing to put the timeand effort into mastering it,

substitute “their own language” — or worse, teaching them that our common language issomehow evil — merely sets them up for failure.What’s more, we further erode public confidence in our ability to produce job-readygraduates. (In many surveys over the past 10 years, employers consistently identify poorcommunication skills as one of their chief complaints about new hires.)The responsibility for helping students learn to use standard American English effectively,and insisting that they do so, cannot fall solely on the English department. The purpose offirst-year composition courses should be to introduce students to the basics of goodprofessional communication — grammar, sentence structure, organization, paragraphdevelopment. If subsequent courses do not build upon and reinforce those fundamentals,then students will conclude that such skills must be not all that important. That appears tobe the case, if those employer surveys are any indication.As academics, we rose to positions of privilege and authority based in large part on ourability to “speak the language.” It seems to me the height of arrogance and hypocrisy, if notoutright discrimination, to deny students access to those same opportunities, whether wedo so intentionally or simply through neglect. Our objective as educators ought to be tohelp them attain what we have attained, if not more — and language proficiency is anecessary prerequisite.In short, standard American English is not inherently racist. It is not merely a “tool of thepatriarchy.” It is a tool for anyone who wishes to use it, and who is willing to put the timeand effort into mastering it, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, cultural background, orsocioeconomic status.Nor will students — once they leave our cushy campuses and enter the professional world— be able to talk and write any way they choose, any more than they will be able to dress orbehave any way they want. Preparing them adequately for life beyond college is arguablyour greatest responsibility — and up to this point, perhaps our biggest failure.

Before attempting to speak this language, a learner must acknowledge these spirits with gifts of tobacco and food. Anyone who attempts Ojibwemowin is engaged in something more than learning tongue twisters. However awkward my nouns, unstable my verbs, however stumbling my delivery, to engage in the language is to engage the spirit. Perhaps that is what my teachers know, and what my English will forgive.

Ojibwemowin is also a language of emotions; shades of feeling can be mixed like paints. There is a word for what occurs when your heart is silently shedding tears. Ojibwe is especially good at describing intellectual states and the fine points of moral responsibility.

For years I saw only the surface of Ojibwemowin. With any study at all one looks deep into a stunning complex of verbs. Ojibwemowin is a language of verbs. All action. Two-thirds of the words are verbs, and for each verb there are as many as 6,000 forms. The storm of verb forms makes it a wildly adaptive and powerfully precise language. Changite-ige describes the way a duck tips itself up in the water butt first.

Fluent speakers have had to fight for the language with their own flesh, have endured ridicule, have resisted shame and stubbornly pledged themselves to keep on talking the talk.

I want to get the jokes. I also want to understand the prayers and the adisookaanug, the sacred stories, but the irresistible part of language for me is the explosion of hilarity that attends every other minute of an Ojibwe visit. As most speakers are now bilingual, the language is spiked with puns on both English and Ojibwe,

The language bit deep into my heart, but it was an unfulfilled longing. I had nobody to speak it with, nobody who remembered my grandfather's standing with his sacred pipe in the woods next to a box elder tree, talking to the spirits. Not until I moved back to the Midwest and settled in Minneapolis did I find a fellow Ojibweg to learn with, and a teacher.

or years now I have been in love with a language other than the English in which I write, and it is a rough affair. Every day I try to learn a little more Ojibwe. I have taken to carrying verb conjugation charts in my purse, along with the tiny notebook I've always kept for jotting down book ideas, overheard conversations, language detritus, phrases that pop into my head. Now that little notebook includes an increasing volume of Ojibwe words.

history had been "whitened" - when white menhad written history books, the black man simply had been left out. Mr. Muhammad couldn't havesaid anything that would have struck me much harder.

I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I got back out ofbed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where I would read for another fifty-eight minutes untilthe guard approached again

When I had progressed to really serious reading, every night at about ten P.M. I would beoutraged with the "lights out." It always seemed to catch me right in the middle of somethingengrossing.

months passed without myeven thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life

my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up abook and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read agreat deal can imagine the new world that opened.

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words - immensely proud to realize thatnot only had I written so much at one time, but I'd written words that I never knew were in theworld. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. Ireviewed the words whose meanings I didn't remember. Funny thing, from the dictionary firstpage right now, that "aardvark" springs to my mind. The dictionary had a picture of it, a long-tailed, long-eared, burrowing African mammal, which lives off termites caught by sticking out itstongue as an anteater does for ants.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on thatfirst page, down to the punctuation marks

Finally, just to start some kindof action, I began copying.

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary - to study, to learn some words.I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship.

It was because of my letters that I happened to stumble upon starting to acquire some kind of ahomemade education.I became increasingly frustrated. at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in lettersthat I wrote, especially those to Mr. Elijah Muhammad. In the street, I had been the most articulatehustler out there - I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to writesimple English,

Apart from what any critic had to say about my writing, I knew I had succeeded where it counted when mymother finished reading my book and gave me her verdict: "So easy to read."

I later decided I should envision a reader for the stories Iwould write. And the reader I decided upon was my mother, because these were stories about mothers.

Why are there few Asian Americans enrolled in creative writing programs? Why do so manyChinese students go into engineering! Well, these are broad sociological questions I can't begin to answer.But I have noticed in surveys -- in fact, just last week -- that Asian students, as a whole, always dosignificantly better on math achievement tests than in English. And this makes me think that there are otherAsian-American students whose English spoken in the home might also be described as "broken" or"limited." And perhaps they also have teachers who are steering them away from writing and into math andscience, which is what happened to me

Math is precise; there is only one correct answer. Whereas, for me at least, theanswers on English tests were always a judgment call, a matter of opinion and personal experience.

hey had lost the CAT scan and she had come for nothing. Shesaid they did not seem to have any sympathy when she told them she was anxious to know the exactdiagnosis, since her husband and son had both died of brain tumors. She said they would not give her anymore information until the next time and she would have to make another appointment for that. So she saidshe would not leave until the doctor called her daughter. She wouldn't budge. And when the doctor finallycalled her daughter, me, who spoke in perfect English -- lo and behold -- we had assurances the CAT scanwould be found, promises that a conference call on Monday would be held, and apologies for any sufferingmy mother had gone through for a most regrettable mistake

Like others, I havedescribed it to people as 'broken" or "fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has alwaysbothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged and neededto be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness.

Yet some ofmy friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother'sEnglish is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid,direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things,expressed things, made sense of the world.

I had learned in school and through books, the forms ofEnglish I did not use at home with my mother.Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of theEnglish I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and usedfurniture and I heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us as well, andhe didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's because over the twenty years we'vebeen together I've often used that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. Ithas become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language Igrew up with.

I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated bylanguage in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language -- the way itcan evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade.And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with.

I am not a scholar of English or literature.