As a rural American, I admit to my sensitivities. I found the use of “cotton picking” in a suburban Michigan classroom offensive too.
Just to be clear, “migrant” means people who travel to work. Most people travel a few miles to get to work.
However, America’s $135-Billion table food industry requires highly-skilled workers who do all the training as well as the work. They are known as migrant farmworkers because they travel with the seasons, moving from state to state, and county to county, to pick crops. Stone fruit and grapes require different skills, and training.
In my community, children of migrant farmworkers (including Hmong, Filipino, Europeans, Latin American, Vietnamese, Mexican, Somalia, Kawaiisu and Piute) show up at school for a few months and leave when their parents travel to work in another county or state. Serving these school-children requires teachers with a strong knowledge of history (that inculcates good cultural skills).
Watching a good teacher in a classroom of students whose parents are aerospace engineers, service workers, professionals, fighter pilots and migrant farmworkers etc. and so on, is an awesome experience. To the benefit of all their students, these teachers incorporate their students’ various cultural roots into history, current events, geography, math, science and literature lessons. The more varied their students, the more knowledge they can absorb, because it makes it personally relevant and builds bonds between students from different cultures. I personally know several migrant farmworker children with grades and accomplishments that earned them entry to Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, and UCDavis. Putting an unqualified teacher into one of these classrooms should be illegal.
At the very least, teachers need to use plain English (and avoid slang, jargon and colloquialisms like cotton-pickin, and y’all, and all hat and no cattle etc). Why did a teacher in Michigan use “cotton-pickin” at all? What was she thinking? How often does she use that phrase in her daily life in Michigan? I suspect her attitude — not her mistake — was the reason she was removed from the district’s substitute teaching list.
Mr. Rockwood, I’m finding your articles interesting, informative and thought provoking (valuable). In my little slice of America, people learn to code-switch when we are little kids. Watch your mouth, or remember who you’re talking to, is all it takes to remind us to switch code. Would I be correct in presuming that code-switching is not a common skill among white people? Do white people even know what code-switching means?
