Language Investigation #2

I can see how individuals with different backgrounds would have a hard time being prepared for the language used in classrooms. Even for standardized testing, the language could be daunting and unrecognizable for student’s who have trouble reading, and don’t come from an educated background.
Useless conventions seemed to muddle up much of middle school for me. What seventh grader is focused on prescribing the right metaphoric analogy for a short story when they barely got to school that day because of one simple fact: they hated school.

I think that is true (and was true for myself) for many junior high and middle school students. They don’t feel safe. They don’t have a academic community with their peers in a way that they can trust each other. I remember little of the rules and regulations of middle school writing and language. I’m sure there were all kinds of group activities, practicing sentence structures, learning articles of language and synthesizing similes. . .but I just didn’t care.

Truly, the ocean of academia that now surrounds my collegiate career, waves from high school and CSU tsunamis, is truly the language I remember and find useful. High school was different because most high school teachers really care about their subject material and that’s where the passion to teach children comes from. But even in high school I let myself slide by with minimal enthusiasm for working on assignments. I have been lucky enough to have a little natural writing ability to get by.

I can see how individuals with different backgrounds would have a hard time being prepared for the language used in classrooms. Even for standardized testing, the language could be daunting and unrecognizable for student’s who have trouble reading, and don’t come from an educated background.

I can see why a teacher would teach the test and not the student. They would want us to succeed on the CSAP or Iwoa Test for the sake of the school, and probably the student. Teaching “so and so is to this as so and so is to that” for the College Prep Courses and letting students skate by with their grammar. I took a college prep class; I was college bound after all so why not? It was the biggest waste of my time I could have imagined. The language of nouns, verbs and predicates was not new for me and the review was not helpful. The “advanced” vocabulary we ran through over the course of 16 weeks didn’t stick because it wasn’t being practically used.

The cynic in me says these courses are taught, yes, for the student to succeed, but also for the school to hopefully gain one or two more points on their AYP report.
That’s not to say I didn’t have English courses I enjoyed or composition teachers that didn’t impart any wisdom. However, I am still kicking myself for never taking AP classes (the only honors class I ever took was a journalism course and college board prep). People used to ask me why I wasn’t in the AP courses (because it was not out of my ability level) and I would reply, “That’s what college is for! I’ll do college work when it’s time for college.” So instead, I let myself sit in classes I was board in, easily succeeding in my literature courses and excelling in reading. I still wish I had taken an advanced composition course in high school. I felt prepared for college, the only challenge I’ve felt in school now is the work load and trying to motivate myself.

Language Investigation #1

There are dozens of communities I belong to. Primarily, I’m a member of the academic community, the CSU community. I say “primarily” because currently it takes up most of my time. We use words like “credit hour”, “course load”, “GPA”, all of which have something to do with the classes we are taking and how it is affecting our grade point average.

Other communities I am involved with include the Rocky Mountain Collegian and College Avenue Magazine. These journalistic and publishing endeavors definitely have their own language in order to communicate effectively between the news reporters, designers, editors and photographers. Currently, I’m a photographer and managing editor. Words I commonly use include “CMYK” “JPEG” “Make sure you .tiff that image”, “We need to sit down for budget” “The slug on that photo is”.

CMYK refers to the color format on an image while working with in Adobe Photoshop. Photos need to be in CMYK for printing purposes so the printer can read the right colors. JPEG is a image format while saving for the web and .tiff is for saving an image to be printed. Budget is when the editors discuss what will be in the paper the following day. This meeting takes about and hour or two and maps out everything that the next day’s paper will contain. The slug on an assignment refers to how the image while be filed on the computer. That way, everyone knows the title and where to find it. If I shoot a basketball game and the slug is meant to be “020809_mbb_texas” but I file it as “BBtexas”, it will make life harder for the designers who layout the pages at night and place the photo.

“Insider” status I think is relative, but there is something to be said for knowing all the steps to a dance. For the magazine, we have to train everyone who works for us to understand the language that revolves around the publication. A designer would never know what the “font library” was is we didn’t show them on the computer. A photographer wouldn’t know the “DPI” for an image (resolution) unless they were taught and shown that for magazine printing the dpi needs to be at 300 resolution and for newsprint 200 dpi is just fine.

While the language I use at work is casual, it is of course technical. That is not the case for how I interact with my roommates, friends or professors. I use very casual language with my roommates (unless of course I’m angry or annoyed, and then become quite snippy and laconic). We have to use words that talk about bills, shoveling walk ways, mowing the lawn, “swiffering” the floor etc.

Cool blog,

Check out http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/ for a interesting and quick hitting blog, a creative commons site.

Memoir

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