homework

Correcting assignments today based on the students' viewing of a Deborah Tannen video lecture about her work on the different ways men and women talk. One of the students wanted to reference her point that neither men nor women talk more, but that who does so varies according to whether the space is public or private. I quote:

"Men do pubic. Women do private."

If only he had added an 's' to 'private'...

this is where I live part 2

So today in my class where we were talking about language and gender we hit the topic of different ways that English refers to men and women. Of course we talked about titles: mr. mrs. miss. ms. and, guess what, a huge number of the students had no idea what ms was. One guy said that he knew the term and that it meant "a widow, um, like she had a husband, but she lost him."