By Dave Anderson:
I firmly beIieve that I speak 3.8% more efficiently than most other native-English speakers as I only use 25 letters in my speech. The letter R is massively overrated. In other words, I have a thick Boston accent. It has softened slightly during the twelve years I have been in Pittsburgh (where I sometimes lose the verb to be, but that is another problem entirely).
According to Arizona, my accent makes me ineligible to teach English in the their public schools. Balloon Juice has the details:
Damn it, another job that I am no longer qualified for. I wonder how many other snow-bird English teacher transplants are SOL under this policy. It has to be targeted against the Bostonians in Arizona, right?The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented... must be removed from classes for students still learning English.
As a west coaster I pronounce creek - crick. It used to drive my X-wife who was from NYC up the wall. My guess is that would be OK in AZ.
ReplyDeleteI guess you'd have to have piles and piles of money if your livelihood was in AZ, you had kids & you actually wanted them to have even a slim chance that they might have a future - i.e. you'd have to send them out of state to receive an education.
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