We referring to teachers as “it” now?
Damn. Underpaid and dehumanized all at once. That’s gotta be rough.
Pfft, rest of the world should start following Finns on this and call everyone and everything ‘it’! Except pets for some reason.
I know a guy who calls people “se” and things “hän”
Cut a bit of slack as the world adjusts to not making assumptions. Yeah “they” would have been better.
Trap em with a bunch of nazis, minorities disproportionately penalised for minor infringements, throw in some beatings and torture and you pretty much have the American prison system!
As a non-native speaker, referring to a single teacher as “they” is not very intuitive (although correct)…
Um… How about “… their money…”?
This guy englishes
I very much agree. Learning English as a foreign language, it feels very wrong to use plural for a single person. I’m still not quite used to it! Although, had I been taught that early on, I doubt it would feel any weirder than using “you are” for a single person.
Funny, English is also my second language but in my first language ‘she’ and plural ‘they’ are the same word, only distinguished by the verb, so it never seemed that weird to me.
Interesting. What’s your first language?
Dutch. It’s ze/zij for both singular female and plural they.
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I find it most inconvenient when “they” is used to refer to one person and a group in the same paragraph.
Is that any different than when you have two people of the same gender and suddenly can’t use plain old gendered pronouns to unambiguously refer to the two people?
Eg, if Susan took Anna’s apple, it’d be confusing to say “she took her apple”.
Yeah pronouns can get really messy. I try to avoid them as much as I can in technical writing so I can follow my own sentences lol.
It’s not plural though. It’s just the third person neuter pronoun. Singular “they” has been a thing in English for centuries, and has only been controversial among a small segment of the population for a very short time.
Think of it a bit like French “vous”. That’s a “plural” (second person) pronoun, but is also used in the singular. In the French case, it’s used as a singular formal second person pronoun in addition to a plural second person pronoun. Nobody in France is getting up in arms about how you shouldn’t use “vous” when talking to one person.
I’m aware it’s a thing and not really a plural. What I was trying to say is that it looks plural and since I didn’t learn about this part of English until several years into my studies as a kid, it isn’t as well established in my mind as “you are” is (that also looks like a plural, but I’m used to it).
“They are” for a single person catches my mental error filter the same way as “I are” or “you is” would, which is highly annoying.
as “you are” is (that also looks like a plural, but I’m used to it)
Okay this actually touches on something interesting, but before I get to that, I think it’s perhaps a sign that your intuition with English is very much at odds with (not merely different from, but directly contradictory to) the broader English speaking community. Most English speakers would be either 100% okay with “you” being either singular or plural, or would be more likely to interpret it as more singular. That’s why some dialects have developed terms like “y’all” or “yous”, and why phrases like “you all” or “you guys” get used.
But the really interesting thing here is that etymologically, you are much closer to the mark. Historically English has had a number of different second person pronouns. You, ye, thou, thee. “You” was, in fact, the plural objective second person pronoun. Today, English never distinguishes between subjective and objective pronouns in the second person, even in common informal use. But it used to have “thou” and “ye” as the singular and plural (respectively) subjective pronouns, and “thee” and “you” as the objective. And I find it kinda funny how that’s basically flipped in modern usage.
And that’s actually a pretty recent development. Less than a decade ago, I remember getting marked down in English class for using “they” as a genderless singular pronoun, as my elderly teacher grew up only ever using “they” to refer to a group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they
This use of singular they had emerged by the 14th century, about a century after the plural they.[4][5][2] It has been commonly employed in everyday English ever since and has gained currency in official contexts. Singular they has been criticised since the mid-18th century by prescriptive commentators who consider it an error.[6] Its continued use in modern standard English has become more common and formally accepted with the move toward gender-neutral language.[7][8] Though some early-21st-century style guides described it as colloquial and less appropriate in formal writing,[9][10] by 2020, most style guides accepted the singular they as a personal pronoun.[11][12][13][14]
Your teacher was just one of those purists and it was never something with strong consensus for being wrong.
Shakespear used they as a singular iirc
And Chaucer split infinitives, but I was always told it was “wrong” in gradeschool. That’s the problem with pedantry: language is a fascinatingly complex and beautiful set of patterns. Boiling it down to rules is at best a handy style guide for formal writing, but at worst it gets weaponed as a way to discriminate against people who use lower prestige dialects.
That’s true, and there is evidence of “they” being used as a singular as far back as over 700 years ago, but only within the last few decades has it been formally accepted by style guides, like the APA or the Chicago Manual.
is not very intuitive though
Yes it is. It’s completely intuitive. Native English speakers do it all the time every day. The singular “they” is used literally without conscious thought. The only time it becomes controversial is with transphobes talking about specific people who do not identify with their gender assigned at birth. Even transphobes use singular “they” without thinking in contexts like this OP where the gender is unknown. (Which is why their “but it’s bad grammar!” arguments fall flat.)
I’d say what’s intuitive is very subjective. Most of a language tends to be intuitive to its native speakers, no matter how unintuitive it seems to someone else.
To me the intuitive genderless option for “he/she” would be “it”. Coming from Finnish, it seems much more natural to have “it” include people instead of using “they” for both singular and plural. Or if using “they”, it would feel intuitive to say “they is” instead of “they are”.
Just because people with years of experience with something don’t have to think about it, doesn’t mean it’s intuitive.
As a non-native speaker, I don’t find it intuitive at all, even though I don’t have to think about it anymore. And as you can see by their post, OP didn’t find it intuitive either.
“it’s” own money? I’m assuming you meant “its” but even then your teacher is an object?
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Don’t assume someone’s pronouns. “It” is a safe bet these days.
“Their” assumes they’re still human though
Pfft. Fucking speciesists.
Damn robots teaching our children. They terk er jerbs
It took yerr jyerrbs!!
If they consent tho… 😏
Anyone who thinks this has never hosted a birthday party for a bunch of grade schoolers. I get enough pizza so they can have a couple of full pizza slices each, they take a few bites, then immediately go back to goofing around with their friends.
Then I have leftover pizza for a long time. XD
I think the joke is that a lot of us were little shits that didn’t appreciate some of the only adults that cared to see us succeed.
True words, yet probably applies to every generation.
I have a handful of teachers who have had a great influence on my life and they were very happy that I reached out decades later to tell them so.
It’s all about the intentions. Not the quantity.
For some reason those school party pizzas tasted so much better than normal
I feel like pizza always tastes a little better in social settings. Does anyone else feel that?
Food should always be enjoyed with others
I do
Forbidden fruit.
It‘s not much but it‘s honest work!
i have never seen a meme this sad before
Kid me: Pizza is pizza.
Adult me: Pizza is pizza, unless it’s Papa John’s.
I learned recently that teachers in my area actually make decent money. Not like… Tech industry money, but for my area they make $30/h on the low end, $43/h median, and $52.60/h on the high end.
That’s a decent living that most people don’t experience. I’m sure some places are awful for teachers though.
Based on the $ ima assume you’re American and probably live in a high cost of living area, they get paid that much to compensate for high prices. They’re probably as poor as the rest of us.
Average wage in my area is around $30/h.
Yeah so they’re poor.
Poor in my mind is not having basic necessities. At $30/h here you could definitely like… own a house, pay all your bills, buy groceries, pay for a vehicle, and still have like… $500+ left in your budget on a single income.
In my experience average pay is just above the peverty line in a given area. Most teachers make shit, especially for what they’re doing. And if the starting pay in your area is $30 the CoL is probably very high.
Like yeah, they’re not homeless, but most people are barely getting by on the average wage in the area.
It’s worth noting that, depending on where you’re talking about, there are a number of possible problems with your figures:
- Teachers in general work far, far more hours than they are officially “required” to. They simply don’t get paid for enough time to actually do all the lesson prep and marking necessary to do their job.
- Schools don’t operate for about 3 months per year. If you’re looking at hourly rate, teachers are on less than three quarters the yearly salary of a full-time position at the same rate.
- As was the point of this meme, teachers are often expected to spend their own money on things for their classrooms. This can range from party stuff to paying out-of-pocket for print-outs of worksheets given to students, to literally needing to buy pencils for students to use.
- Teaching is not a low-skill job. It requires a university degree, during which time they likely supplied many hours of unpaid labour in the form of “prac” work experience. Early pracs might be mostly learning experiences where the student teacher isn’t providing much value, but towards the end of their degree teachers will often literally just be the ones responsible for teaching the class.
- It’s, like, an important job. Arguably the most important job in our society, up there with far-better-remunerated roles like doctors and civil engineers in terms of doing things that are fundamentally important to keeping society running.
Future teacher here, my salary starts at 52$ CAD/hour, which is great! But I’m only paid for the time I’m in class, which is roughly 3h45 per day…
This pay doesn’t include the time to prepare the class, the time to correct, the time to attend mandatory meetings on the lunch break. Finally, we don’t have our vacation payed, so they split our pay to give us a salary during the summer (okay this last point is fair, but it illustrates that hourly salary in education is not representative).
So are we now just reposting all the old memes from reddit?
Well I don’t go to Reddit so it works for me. Down vote if you don’t like it.
If you look at OP’s profile, that is exactly what s/he’s doing.
Was this not the top post of all time from reddit? Huh.
It’s not much.
But it’s dishonest work.
