It’s all about the intentions. Not the quantity.
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.
As a non-native speaker, referring to a single teacher as “they” is not very intuitive (although correct)…
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.
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.
I find it most inconvenient when “they” is used to refer to one person and a group in the same paragraph.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
It‘s not much but it‘s honest work!
