Snow day

Mela

Yesterday McGill, as well as every other educational institution in Montreal and indeed in most of Quebec and eastern Canada, cancelled classes because of the major snowstorm that hit our part of the country. The snowstorm (a 40-cm dump over 18 hours or so) wasn’t all that unusual—it’s just that the dump was swift and the wind ferocious. “Visibility near zero” has such an ominous ring. The cancellations by other institutions were to be expected. But that ouruniversity would cancel classes because of the weather—THAT was a very rare event. Usually we hang in there, or try to, when all other schools admit defeat and let people stay home and safely off the roads.

So the Wednesday evening class for which this is the blog didn’t happen, and I was able to use the class time to reflect on how it’s been going, sociolinguistically speaking. Other people also thought about course-related topics—a couple of new posts and many new comments appeared. 

The engagement with sociolinguistic issues that has been happening in this blog is, I can safely say, one of the most exciting things I have ever had the privilege to witness and be part of in 25 years as a university teacher. I could never have imagined that it would be so intense and so passionate, or that I would feel so caught up in it. The most recent posts and comments have pushed the level of engagement to a new level, as we start to look at issues that are more fraught than simple geographic variation (“dialects”) or age-graded differences in ways of speaking. People are starting to challenge themselves and each other on the question of how gender interacts with language use. On how language policy affects the everyday affordances open to speakers (we live in a place ideally suited for observing the effects of language policy on people’s lives at close range, as the other blog I am involved with, BILD-LIDA, has been saying in many voices for some years). We will soon be talking about that loaded subject, RACE, and how racialization intersects with language. Many of the points brought up will be new for many people. There will be differences of opinion, there will be discussion, there will be LEARNING.

And best of all from the instructor’s point of view—I can enjoy and facilitate and participate without having to be a martinet about prescriptively current standard English or worry in my usual nit-pickety fashion about grading. I wish it hadn’t taken me 25 years to learn how to relinquish control a little better in the classroom—but thank goodness I got the chance. That has, for me, been the most important learning to come out of this blog, and it has been a liberation. Thanks to all the contributors, and keep those posts coming—they are being noticed. The opinions of people in this class are thoughtful, they are informed by a deep curiosity about language, they are respectful of others while pushing the envelope:

To speak is to take risks. To acknowledge the necessity of risk-taking in language use is a profoundly sociolinguistic act; to speak out about the necessity and the risks to others is to help to educate them. 

Educational sociolinguistics at its best, as far as this grateful instructor is concerned.