Teacher Discussion Forums

My colleague wondered why native speakers use 'their' in the singular form i.e:

As seen in point form:

- instructor should manage their time equally amoung students


Here' 'instructor' is singular, but used with the plural pronoun 'their'.

Anyone know why this is acceptable?

'time' here belongs to students and even the instructor, maybe in this sense it is 'their'.

It's a particularly inept sentence. Presumably something is missing before "instructor". Be that as it may:

Complete the space:

"(Every) instructor should manage _____time equally among students"

Using "their" here instead of "his or her" is pretty standardised these days. What are the alternatives? "his" could be considered as at least fogeyish, if not antiquated or sexist. "his or her" is laborious.

There's not much alternative.

That's why we often change the subject to plural. "Instructors should divide their time equally among students."

Isn't the pronoun kind of trespassing there? We might be better off wihout it.


Instructors should manage time equally among students.


Instructors should divide the time equally among students.

I like Juan's analysis.

Anuradha says:

We might be better off wihout it.

I say:

Ah yes, this solution will work, it's brilliant! (seriously, I like it a lot); however, native speakers use "their" in this context quite a bit; therefore, one will run the risk of sounding NON-NATIVE!!!

The example is a bad one, but the general question deserves an answer, and that is that 'their' is used to avoid being specific about sex, or using the clumsy 'his or her'.

And 'they' and 'their' for the singular has a long history in English.