I could not seem to post to one of my student's blogs, so I am responding to her April 14 post here.

Her commentary on Jeff Rice's blog made me think about Cynthia Selfe's argument in the piece that Trevor asked us to read: "Lest We Think the Revolution is a Revolution" from Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies

She states that the Internet got promoted (or misunderstood) as a place that would foster raceless, genderless communication (Not that going raceless or genderless is necessarily a good thing -- see Alice Walker's "My Father's Country is the Poor" - but that is a topic for another post).

Back to Selfe's argument: she states that despite the potential for the internet to subvert or even overthrow racist and sexist attitudes that persist in our culture, all the internet has done is market the same old prejudice, "replicate processes already in circulation," as Rice would say.

One final comment to my student: You are wise and brave to ask "You Talkin' to me?" We all need to be asking that about all of the pedagogies we try and come up with the things that we can really get behind and not the coolest fad. I fully accept that several (many?) of your classmates will never teach using blogs, but I want them to try it and be able to articulate why not. So you are right to ask, Christina, but you are also right to try it out.

If anyone calls, tell hu I'm gone for the day

"If anyone calls, tell hu I'm gone for the day."

"If a student turns in a paper one day late, hus grade will be marked down."

"When we hire a new dean, I want to meet hum."

We all have our pet grammar rules, and mine is gender-neutral pronouns for singular subjects. I loathe the day that Standard Edited English accepts: "If a student turns in a paper one day late, their grade will be marked down." I am generally not a prescriptive grammarian, but on this issue, I feel there has got to be a better way.

My better way: HU

I coined (in my own mind) this alternate pronoun to serve as a gender neutral alternative to "he" or "s/he" or "he or she." I picked "hu" because it is the first two letters of human. I sort of ignored the "man" part and went for the "hu" part.

I usually tell my students about my personally coined pronoun and invite them to use it in their papers. To my delight, a few take me up on it.

But this semester, I had not told my students about "hu" -- until yesterday. Two of my students were poking around on wikipedia in our computer classroom and came across an entry on gender neutral pronouns. Turns out there are lots of folks with lots of great alternative pronouns!

Down with "their" as a singular pronoun!

(When I get a moment, I going to add "hu" to the wiki for all to revel in)