Language Investigation 2: Unprepared

Throughout primary and secondary school, I learned to write a “great” structured essay and I read all the required (as well as the suggested) texts. I was a gold star student. My teachers told me what to write, and I wrote it. I learned that an essay has three parts- introduction, body, conclusion, and I could write one in a wee three paragraphs to a great seven. I could tell you about any of the classics in literature including the author, cultural context, plot synopsis, and main themes. I was a teacher pleaser. That’s what I learned was valuable, because that’s how I got the good grade. I was an expert at retaining all the information my teachers presented and then writing it down in a few varying words to turn in as a paper or scribble down on the test.

When reflecting on how these conventions have affected my experiences as a college writer, it was awfully frustrating to have graduated high school with a gold cord and honors and then arrive at college and experience academic failure. My first year of college was very thorny. On top of battling an acute homesickness, I was not academically prepared for college. Consequentially, my grades suffered. Thinking critically was very foreign and even painful at times. It was a struggle to get away from asking myself what does the professor want me to say in this paper, rather than what do I think for myself. I had been trained, for so many years, to report information based on what my teachers were looking for; synthesizing information and drawing new knowledge from those findings was not familiar to me. Even in a lot of my college classes I was asked to write in a manner of reporting and re-wording information.

It wasn’t until I took a class taught by Deborah Dimon in the English department, that I really started to learn “critical literacy” in my writing. I remember it took me immensely more time to write her papers than the papers I was writing for other classes. She was asking us to view everything we encounter as a text (not just the books we read), then to make connections with those texts, and out of those connections draw new conclusions and pull unfamiliar knowledge out. She was asking us to think critically. My brain jellied at first. Writing that first paper of hers was almost excruciating. I was up all night, clawing and scratching for some light. Each connection and resulting conclusion was a birthing process. That morning I was exhausted, but I had a paper to be proud of. It was mine. To find knowledge on my own out of my very own connections was revolutionary. It was like turning a 2-dimensional photo of knowledge with limited color into a 3-demensional experience that had hues I had only ever imagined existed. There was depth to learning. My mind reveled in it. It was hungry all along for this kind of comprehension. However, for all the grandeur of being a critical thinker, learning it was, never the less, a tricky process, one which my earlier education failed to bring me to.