Cassie's A-Pop Blog

this week’s reading of wild meat and the bully burgers made me think a lot about how we use our words, especially in college settings. i’m thankful for the lack of restrictions in our blog posts, because in this space that is my blog i don’t have to conform to standard american english (SAE) and all the annoying conventions behind it. i can talk like i do (for the most part) in real life instead of this constructed vernacular of academic language that’s really hard to understand half of the time. in other words: blehhhhh, fuck english

english is my first language (unfortunately). my sister has an associates degree in english, so while i hate english and the lack of accessibility of academic language, i was taught at a really young age how to read and write in standard english. she grilled me on my vocabulary, my pronunciation, my grammar, and all those other tedious conventions really early in life. her teaching me all those things got me really high marks in reading and writing tests, so high that i was considered college-level in my elementary school years. i prided myself over my college-level comprehension skills in 5th grade. i thought i was so smart and good at reading and writing for years because of that rank, like no one could call my writing bad or point out any mistakes in my writing because obviously i was right all the time, i had college-level comprehension. once i actually hit college, though, i realized how arrogant younger me actually was. my writing is far from perfect, at least to college standards (and also to my own personal standards, but that’s just me being a perfectionist). it’s a lot easier for me to take criticism now about my writing, but i still feel like i should be living up to that college level ranking i got in 5th grade. it fucks up my perception of my own work, which is super not helpful for me and my anxiety.

i could empathize a lot with lovey during the second chapter of wild meat. from her frustration with understanding math to her struggling to speak when she was called on in class, i could see a lot of my younger self in her. we have different skills sets, with her speaking pigdin, but i and other students in the K-12 school systems have been stigmatized by our teachers for not meeting their standards, not automatically knowing everything that they expected us to know when we walked into their classrooms. it’s a big reason why i want to become a teacher myself, so that other students of color don’t have to be publicly shamed by their teachers who are supposed to be mentors and guide their students’ understandings, not berate them and force them to conform to one singular understanding of the world. i got really frustrated when their teacher told them not to speak in their native tongue ; just because their language is different from yours doesn’t mean they aren’t intelligent and as capable of learning as the other students in the room! we should be encouraging students to use what they already know and have at their disposal to increase their learning. if the language of music suits their learning best, let them do creative projects with different sounds; if they speak a language other than standard english, let them conduct their own projects using their native tongues, like putting on a cultural festival or teaching other students about themselves through speaking like they would at home. it’s much more effective to have students use the knowledge they already have to learn new things instead of enforcing one standard to learning that not even half of your students will be able to fully understand at the end of the day.

this should automatically apply to our program as well. there’s such a wide array of understandings and cultural backgrounds in our program that there will inevitably be language barriers and cultural conflict between each other. for example, it’s ridiculous of us to assume that each of us learned how to speak english as our first language. letting our classmates be able to use their first language without asking them to translate for us is important to think about—i have a feeling a lot of us will be using words or phrases from our cultures that would be exhausting to have to translate to english every time they pop up. we should take it upon ourselves if we don’t speak the same language or have the same understanding as another person in the room to let people do their own thing, and ideally learn from each others experiences and reflect on everything that we’ve been taught to know and believe.