Neighborhoods and Schools, Evolution of Language

Neighborhoods and Schools Guests: Felton Earls, Research Professor of Human Behavior and Development in the Harvard School of Public Health  Gary Seastrand, Former Public School Teacher and Administrator, directs the BYU Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education & Schooling  Bill Hulterstrom, CEO of the United Way of Utah County  A neighborhood used to be a place where kids played together outside and people sat on their porches plugged into what was happening on their block instead of online on their Facebook feeds. In many neighborhoods, all of the kids would go to the same school just a few blocks away.  The nature of neighborhoods in America has fundamentally changed, thanks to housing policies and open enrollment school systems and the internet’s power to make us feel more connected to someone on the other side of the world to the person living next door.  “Trust was important. More important than trust was what we call agency or a sense that you care enough about what was going wrong in the neighborhood to intervene. If a child was disrespecting an adult, neighbors would intervene and correct the child,” says Earls.  Evolution of Language/Grammar Guests: Dr. Vyv Evans, Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University and author of Language of the Mind  Cynthia Hallen, Professor of English Language and Linguistics at BYU  We all use it, we all had to learn it, and we all know what it sounds like when its not used the right way. It’s called grammar. Yes, the important topic of grammar. Why we have it? Where did grammar emerge? What's the nature of it in our language. The rules and words behind languages change all the time, but how?  “You read style manuals and they will tell you that there is a fixed grammatical correct way of deploying grammar. But it actual evolves amazing quickly,” says Evans, “at different rates. English has changed dramatically beyond recognition within the past 1,000 years.”  For example,”’Ain’t’ used to be a legal form for the first person,” says Hallen.