Description

Entering the Fall semester in City College was an occurrence that frankly wasn’t in my plan book. A last option, a safety net, something to fall back on, that’s all this school meant to me when applying to colleges, yet there I found myself, in the director’s office building out my schedule. Unsure of the validity and dreams this school sold, I was hesitant to take classes that were out of the ordinary, unnecessary, or not geared towards the major I was pursuing. As we were speaking my frustration grew longer in finding no classes seeming to fit my needs, “ would you enjoy a sociology class”, “ I promise you anthropology could give you insight on what to pursue”, every suggestion I shot down. Frustration became a shared feeling and the glass was punctured as she signed me up for a required class. English 101. Freshman Composition. Fine. 11am- 12:15am, no biggie. It was a class I knew was required and something I felt comfortable taking. English being one of my strong suits made this class exciting to me, and eager to learn about the hardship that English language and literature brought in college, a level hopefully above the AP’s I took in high school. This class to me ultimately became the epitome of what I was to judge the school upon. English 101 is a class you take everywhere, whether it was my dream school in NYU, the prestigious Boston University I was meant to attend, or the reality that became CCNY. This essay portrays my first encounter with a CCNY project, and is the base on which to judge my improvement and progression in this class.

Language and Literacy Narrative

Cover Letter: Phase one

Through phase one where Rhetorical analysis worksheets and intake of literature that was both vulnerable and teaching was the introduction to the class, I reflect upon the way I encountered those assignments, and the way I’ve grown to encounter them now. At first, I encountered them extremely literally, I would take the face value of the words that Saleem spoke in his Ted Talk, and merely understand Hughes’s “Theme for English B”. I soaked in the content but I wasn’t able to properly learn the lessons it gave to me. Through this phase I’ve learned to distinguish understanding and analysis. I’ve learned that they work in hand in hand, first you must understand the context, words, and intentions an author has behind their piece of work, and then you must compare it to your own life, almost cross examine your old understanding of the subject they tackle, and reach a verdict of what to add on, eliminate, or keep original.

     Starting the craft and writing my Language and Literacy narrative was tricky due to the change of perspective I had to adopt in face of the assignment. I no longer had one person as part of my audience, being the teacher that would grade the assignment, but rather I had to appeal to an audience of around 30 university students, all who reached the same destination as me, but partook in different tumultuous journeys to get here. I had to shift my writing from exhibiting a piece of work that was easy to understand, to a piece of work that was easily able to coincide with and relate too. It no longer became a matter of using the “right” words, or even using the “right” grammar, but using a form of language that was natural to me, one that conveyed Jeffrey for who I was, and justifiably illustrated the experiences I went through.

     If I had one word to describe this phase, it would genuinely be: insightful. I learned through writing this assignment that Language and Literacy is so much more than an essay or poem with words on a page or a speech that’s given at an important ceremony, but rather almost a state of mind, a state of mind where you allow yourself to reflect upon your own experiences and morals, and accurately express them to people that may only grasp concepts of one part of your story, or only relate to the part where you said you liked chicken, but the important aspect is that you make an impact, you bring one part of your story and inadvertently add it to someone else’s. I learned Language and literacy isn’t shy of a rawness to your writing, or even one-takes, but rather embraces all kinds of efforts, and respects it just the same.

     The term that has most impacted my writing is definitely context. Through my writing and analysis of other pieces of language and literacy, I learned that to properly convey a message, you must first make the reader or listener know who you are to a deeper level than just your name and place of birth. For me the most effective way to approach this was to preview any experience or story I was about to divulge in by exemplifying the manner into which I encountered everyday life, and the viewpoint I had on the life we all lived. If I was an extremely joyful person who saw the world through rose-tinted glasses, or a person that viewed the bottle as half-empty, I had to find a way to express that to the reader so that they could understand the perspective of the past Jeffrey, and make a connection to how that perspective might have changed or grown to the present Jeffrey, the one that’s in front of the classroom presenting his piece of work. Exigence is something that worked hand in hand with context and the presenting aspect of the language and literacy narrative, the want and need for my message and story to be conveyed was equally as important as the story in of itself as my work could not have a possible meaning without an element of purpose and necessity. I realized in the audience’s eyes, how seriously you took your own work was only half of how serious they would perceive it to be, so you have to give 110% in order for your work to even be considered for analysis.

    This phase’s assignment helped me achieve a Course Learning outcome of “Developing strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing.” Apart from the meat and potatoes of the piece of work I created, I came to gain skills in fine tuning said work, and realizing the small details are what determined the quality of my work. I learned to revise, revise, revise! which is something I have not previously been adding to my writing. Making multiple versions of the same piece gave me new views on how I myself understood the work, and through collaborating with peers I gained new perspective on what my work could be interpreted as, and gave me more control to how I wanted the audience to comprehend my work and let me really narrow it down. Most importantly it made me learn to not be complacent with my work and put my genuine heart into it, but equally as important taught me to not oversaturate or overthink my work, what worked for me then, and what works for me now should always remain and be the beating heart to my Language and Literacy Narrative.

Language and Literacy Narrative:

Language and Literacy is something that throughout my childhood and schooling I believed was one of my strong suits. Through academic validation, teacher notes, and the ease I took to writing an essay, writing to me was always something that was required, nothing more, nothing less. As an adolescent, physical therapy is something that became routine in my daily life because of muscular issues with my calf and back that at times rendered me unable to walk and created a sense of pain that was constant. Physical therapy and the daily after school trips to rehabilitation centers became my new normal and life slowly began to revolve around it. Steadily, simple activities began to become unbearable and unfeasible for my small body. Having my legs buckle under me when climbing 5 floors of my middle school despite the fact that I played a full 90 minutes of soccer the day before became a common oddity. There was nothing out of place in my mind, and to what became to everyone around me devastating, to me was life, and in my own little world, I still viewed myself as the champion I always thought I was.

Eventually I found myself in NYU, an all-white and purple room with a student doctor wearing a long white coat, white dress shirt and a light purple tie dangling in the air. I found myself unable to provide answers to the questions I was receiving, with my eyes counting the number of tiles that took up the floor and figuring out what each needle represented. A black composition notebook along with a yellow standardized number two pencil entered my frame of view, and with no instructions other than “you have homework now” was given and he exited the room and stated that I was free to leave. I took the notebook and pencil out of my bookbag, and I almost felt compelled to write something, almost like I truly owed the universe something. I found it was easier to spill my thoughts onto a page, and I vividly remember the first thing I wrote in that notebook: “I hate physical therapy”, something so simple and evident to anyone, yet I’ve never voiced it before. I found my voice. I ended up writing more than five pages in that session. It was easy to put words on a page that I could never muster in person. The power of knowing I could modify my writing, edit, and revise was a power I never truly experienced before. I found writing to be liberating for me due to the definition I could bring to it. With writing I can show exactly what I meant in the past, in the present, and in the future. With writing I could take back words that I simply could not take back if I voiced them. With writing I could state something and give a full explanation as to what I meant, and by the time you finish reading you forget my initial statement, and remember the correlation that I made you make back to me. At the time when whenever I spoke, I felt everything I said was taken too literally and misconstrued to whatever my parents wanted to hear, and whatever the doctors wanted to diagnose me with. Writing to me was the freedom to be understood, and the freedom to be respected. For the next five months, me and my doctors would communicate through this format of writing that didn’t require my voice in words, but rather a composition notebook and a number two pencil.