A rich teenager in Texas kills four people and the judge sentences him to probation.
The defense argued that he was victimized by being wealthy and should not serve time in jail for killing people. The judge agreed. No, seriously.
A Victim of Wealth
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Clarissa's Blog 
I also liked the idea:
“His parents should be sentenced as they are responsible for their MINOR child until he reaches 18”
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“Miller said Couch’s parents gave him “freedoms no young person should have.” He called Couch a product of “affluenza,” where his family felt that wealth bought privilege and there was no rational link between behavior and consequences.”
And naturally the court felt that the best way to rectify this irresponsibility was to mete out absolutely no punishment for the reckless deaths of four people.
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But God forbid a less wealthy person be caught with a bit of weed. I could almost understand this story if it weren’t for that.
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“But God forbid a less wealthy person be caught with a bit of weed.”
– Exactly.
Besides, many people don’t even begin to realize how much easier life is for those with brilliant language skills.
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// Besides, many people don’t even begin to realize how much easier life is for those with brilliant language skills.
Do you mean speaking correct English, preferably without accent?
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Speaking, reading, and writing. Remember the young woman who gave evidence in Trayvon Martin’s trial? The pool of jobs that would even consider her is severely limited. This is the face of real, hopeless, tragic poverty which doesn’t even have a voice because nobody is willing to invest the effort needed to hear such people.
This topic touches me because I have many students who talk like she does, and it was appalling to me how shocked everybody acted when she spoke at trial.
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May be, you want to blog about it? How can somebody with English as a mother tongue go to school for years and not be taught correct, standard version of English? Can school teachers help those students, how and why they aren’t doing it now with success? In Israel immigrant children learn Hebrew, regardless of their parents’ success at learning the language, and talk normally. Why not in America?
One of my ideas would be make school a place where only correct English is permitted, even if it isn’t politically correct. Of course, students must be taught first how to speak, starting with first grade.
Also, how much is it a race and immigrant issue? Are there many white Americans, who talk like the young woman you mentioned?
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I have had too many discussions with do-gooders who insist this is “a dialect” and that students will be abused by suggestions that there is anything wrong with it. That this “dialect” severely curtails the students’ chances of finding a good job is of no interest to them.
I can’t say it’s exclusively a race issue. It’s more of a class issue where some kids end up in bad schools and don’t have a chance to access a good secondary education. As for immigrants, they tend to have much better English in college than native speakers, so they are never a problem.
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There was to-do in my local area because a head teacher proposed ‘banning’ local dialect while in class. Lots of well meant handwringing – but I was completely on the teacher’s side. But then, you see, I had the experience of recruiting for staff in the area and the substance of the head teacher’s worry, that the local dialect usage was being carried over to the students’ written work, was completely justified. When you have people applying for jobs with sentence constructions such as: “Ah bin goon Broms College, min am dun, ay day finsh fower wiks, ay bay wunt mekshift hoors.” it really does put them at a disadvantage compared to the applicants who can write standard english.
Also as context: it’s an area with pretty much the highest unemployment rates in the country; I never had to advertise so much as a 4 hour saturday job because I used to get hundreds and hundreds of c.v’s handed in over the counter every week. And this was before the recession, lord knows what it’s like now. In other words, they need all the help with jobs they can get.
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This is exactly what I mean! We are also in an area with very high unemployment and the segregation here is a very real and observable fact.
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