Humanising Language Teaching
Year 2; Issue 4; July 2000

Dear Mario,

I have been meaning to write since I discovered the HLTmag while browsing through the pages in the Guardian's ELT section.

I would like to add my voice to the others thanking Pilgrims for this refreshing, illuminating and eminently user-friendly publication. It is so relieving to find that the progressive approach is still alive and well in EFL. It is also highly motivating and equally fascinating to read the ideas that our colleagues throughout the world are able to put into words.

They, along with Pilgrims, deserve our thanks and our admiration.

However, if you will also permit me to give voice to a little disquiet I have about the magazine. I was disappointed to see the inclusion of jokes which rely on unfavourable stereotypes and which can be perceived by some people as racist.

In order to pre-empt an accusations of political correctness , let me say that I am all too familiar with the arguments used in justification of such jokes, but in my mind they do not hold water. Jokes which portray the Irish as stupid or which rely on the schema of the Irish as a stupid race, while made in good faith, do nothing but perpetuate division and inequality.

I am sure that was not the intention of Pilgrims, nor of the person who sent in such jokes. However I am equally sure that you will understand that to some of us, such jokes are offensive and nor worthy of inclusion in a magazine as humanistic as HLT.

Other than that I must once again voice my gratitude and respect towards the people who have worked to bring us this magazine. Long may you continue!

Best Wishes

Diarmuid Fogarty

Dear Diarmuid,

Thank you for your warm and heartfelt letter. I join you in thanking the many people from Sao Paulo to Gdansk, and from the US Middle West to Japan who have keyed-in the screens of HLT, some of them brave pieces, some of them lyrically or intellectually beautiful pieces and some of them simply technically useful ones. It is these people, from across the curved planet, who allow me to claim that HLT has been home to a lot of good writing (see, for instance, Janet Braithwaite's piece in 2000/3, the last issue , which I judge to be stylistically as good as Stevick's best, and does he not have the best prose voice in EFL of the last half of the 20th century?)

It is not surprising that writers dealing with the whole person, including the emotional side of learning, should write, on average, better than people mainly interested in test validity, kataphoric reference or the perceptual salience of word endings and beginnings in contrast to word middles.

The issue of jokes that offend is a thorny one for me. If a reader feels that the stock anti-Irish jokes nestle in with the Norman Kings, the blood-thirsty Lord Protector, the Potato Famine, the cruel death of Bobby Sands and the current unbelievable arrogance of the Orange hard hat men marching through Catholic areas of Derry and Belfast and calling it part of the "peace process", then I heartily agree with you that they are tasteless to the point of obscenity.

If you take an anthropological point of view then jokes about out-groups become an inevitable part of the in-group building of self identity. In UK at the moment 14 year-old roller bladers have snide stories and jokes they tell about "pykies ", or kids who hang about defining themselves as non-roller bladers.

Mario

ps: One thing I sometimes do is to take a Jewish joke and dress it in Catholic clothes, or take an "Irish joke" and reverse it so the Englishman ends up as its butt. These tricks can change the flavour of the joke but not destroy its laughter provoking incongruity.