I am going to write about Gere and Bartholomae, because the ideas they raise seem to fit well in conjunction with one another. Based on these articles, I have been thinking more and more about how I became comfortable with academic writing. I wasn’t comfortable with taking command with an academic voice in high school, but I took to it quite readily in college. Theorizing Bartholomae’s ideas about inventing the university in conjunction with Gere’s assessment of the kinds of environments that lend themselves best to composition has led me to an understanding. My writing improved generally upon exposure to the college classroom, but specifically become more academic, for two main reasons—the first, that I was encouraged to have big thoughts and make connections between text and autobiography or political context that were never allowed previously, and secondly, that every time I was there I was there by choice.
At least in my experience, my first semester at the university required immersion in academic texts. We weren’t just reading novels or textbooks; we were reading theory and literary analysis, we were reading the opinions of others and piecing together one of our own. So, in a sense, having already been admitted, we were not “imagining the university” as much as we were inside of it, taking everything in, mastering the conventions of this new way of thinking, speaking, and being. My first semester of college I had to take a bus line from beginning to end to get from my mother’s house to school, and I remember every night when I came home, just feeling electrified! I had so many thoughts and ideas, I was constantly revisiting what I had learned that day and making connections between different concepts I learned about in different classes. Often I would walk the mile home from the bus stop very quickly in the dark, with my face down in the cool winter air, warm breath making clouds upon exhale, trying not to slip on any ice and get home as quickly as possible. It is difficult to describe without sounding a little crazy, but starting college made me afraid of dying. Every night I walked home from the bus in the freezing darkness, I felt so determined just to get home, and was paranoid that anything might come at me and interrupt the quest I was on. I was so hungry and so alive; I felt so on the verge of something monumental my first semester of college, that I became incredibly afraid that something might take away my ability to see the quest through, and often everything that I saw (a sign, a fire hydrant, a bush mistaken for an unchained dog) posed a threat to me…to my ability to realize my full potential.
In other words, something happened to me. College tapped into me in a way that k-12 school never did. It is hard to say if it was the different academic environment, my own changing attitude toward schooling, or a combination of the two. However, when I got to college, I became part of the conversation. I needed to be in that conversation. I think that I made a similar decision to that of Dorothy Allison, who describes this as “deciding to live” in the opening essay of her collection of short stories, Trash. Somehow, in making a commitment to write and to think, to treat my own thoughts and ideas as something worthy of consideration, to elevate my own speech to the level of those whom I admired, was a decision to live in the world--to be engaged, and to take action. It was also a confirmation: that I could, that I was worthy.
(I will fit this experience into and against the thoughts of Gere and Bartholomae as it happens when I share my draft paper with y'all this Tuesday!)
-Erin M. Day
(AKA "The Moment of Change is the Only Poem") ;)
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