What are English teachers teaching for pronouns these days?

I agree with this as well. Aside from sentence construction, the finer points of grammar and usage are pretty insignificant when compared to overall elements of style.

This is the correct answer. It’s a nonissue.

Is that you, Andrew Tate, writing from your prison cell in Romania?

I teach HS English. Pronouns are not taught in high school as it is a simple grammar lesson that is taught in elementary school. Not sure how it’s being taught there.

That being said, in prior years (post 2015), I’ve had one student each year tell me they (ironic example of the pronoun ‘they’ making sense) go by a different name and/or gender than is on the roll sheet. It can be hard to keep track of the gender thing if that student prefers an atypical pronoun, so I avoid the issue largely by referring to students by their preferred names. Avoiding pronouns requires less mental energy. But, it’s mostly a non-issue.

"The diagnostic label gender identity disorder (GID) was used until 2013 with the release of the diagnostic manual DSM-5. The condition was renamed to remove the stigma associated with the term disorder. People with gender dysphoria commonly identify as transgender."

- the above, from Wikipedia

NiceGyseLast, don't be too sure that you don't know any transgender people. Not every trans person shares their gender identity with the world, or with a wide group of people.

There is no blanket approach to how educators deal with pronouns for transgender students.

There exists no agenda for recruiting anyone to be LGBTQ.

As a teacher my top priority is making my kids feel safe in the classroom. Learning comes 2nd. Can’t learn if you’re not feeling safe. So it’s pretty easy- you use each students pronouns that they request. If their parents don’t like it, I don’t really care, because my job is to make my students feel safe and cared for. We talk about using somebody’s name in place of pronouns if you ever are confused. If somebody scoffs at the issue and treats it as an actual problem, they are probably not very accommodating at all, just accommodating when it is convenient to them.

BS. Humans learn VERY fast when they feel unsafe.

Very thought out response. Also 0% true. Enjoy your day

Look, another idiot creating an anti-trans thread on letsrun.

That's why HS students in the crime-ridden areas usually learn the fastest, isn't it?

I used to tutor English grammar many years ago in junior college. It never ceased to amaze me how so many students lacked even the most basic concepts of spelling, punctuation and grammar. I honestly don't know how I would teach it today.

Thanks for all the replies everyone. I am mainly trying to find out what is taught in schools and at what grade level it is taught. I remember learning about pronouns but don't have any idea when that was introduced. Grade school maybe? It sounds like several teachers here have examples of accommodation and individual scenarios, but not specific grammatical structure as a hard rule.

Lenny I appreciate your insight and I do have more questions. Why was the word "they" chosen to be used as a singular pronoun when it already existed as a plural?

Wouldn't casual usage be considered slang as opposed to proper grammar? And wouldn't it be desirable to reject slang in written and spoken assignments? Or is this a greater push towards acceptance of all things casual? I will use swearing during speeches or in public as an example which seems to be much more prominent in the last few years.

I apologize if I come off as being insensitive but I live in a very rural part of the country where we haven't been exposed to this stuff for very long.

I'm a professor at a fairly prestigious British university. For our PhD programme, people have started to write recommendation letters using them/they, guess it's a good idea in the abstract but at a concrete level just makes things sound clumsy.

Related to that, wanted to mention that my wife is Hungarian, and in that language there is no gender specific pronoun (he/she is the same). But if you suggested to a Hungarian that their society has a better gender equality ethos because of it they would laugh at you, because they suck at it for reasons unrelated to pronouns.

It’s funny how the people who call themselves “independent thinkers” and everybody else “sheep” generally have the some of the lowest intelligence.

Liberals claim to be the most independant thinkers.

Were you a bad English teacher? Good English teachers with a foundation in gramatical theory and literature have always excepted and encouraged singular "they/them." There has been a few weird movements by uninformed people in the mid 20th century to try to claim they/them was ungramatical, but they pretty much failed. Steven Pinker on the topic below

This use of "they", "them" and "their" has a long history of use, even in written English. William Caxton, the first printer in England, writes in 1470, "Each of them should make themself ready"; William Shakespeare prays that "God send everyone their heart's desire." It was only in the 18th century that grammarians labelled "they" as ungrammatical, on the grounds that the pronoun should be singular if it corresponded to a singular noun. (These grammarians were less worried about gender: their solution was to use "he" and pretend it included females.) But a living language is stronger than grammarians: singular "they" has resisted two centuries of attempts to regulate it out of English. In the 1970s feminists drew attention to how grammar rules in books were at odds with common usage, and how the rules also discriminated against women. There were some attempts at compromise: newly invented sex-inclusive forms, among them "tey", "co", "per" and "E", were put forward, but none of them caught on. Why should they? A solution already existed. Major British grammar and usage books now consider this "they" as acceptable. They are doing their job: recording what many educated speakers of the language say and write. - Catherine Walter, Chilton, Oxon.

The "they" pronoun is now being taught as appropriate for those who identify as trans or non-binary. This is a bit of an evolution, as educators were slow to be okay with making a plural pronoun singular. But the English language is an ever-evolving thing, becoming more complex, while trying to be as user-friendly as possible. Adapting the they/them pronoun in this way is a great example of that.