5B or Not 5B: That Is The Question

With People As With Words, Context Matters

by David James Tibergien

Over the past year I have developed a lot as a writer. As someone whose writing was at one time focused toward persuasion, I have become more comfortable as someone who writes to entertain. While I believe that political rhetoric can be entertaining and engaging, my audience and thus my goals as a writer have transformed. I can relate to ESL students in that the writing I used to produce was supposed to be informative and persuasive to a very broad audience without offending or provoking anyone who might disagree with the views expressed. My goals as a creative writer are quite different in the sense that I believe that if I don't provoke thoughts or feelings in my audience, I have done them a disservice. While I am still speaking the same English that I have always spoken, the new goals that I must meet have posed a challenge to all my verbal sensibilities.

I can see where a student who was indoctrinated into an old and inefficient writing process, and who received good grates with poor quality papers in high school might meet a great deal of frustration when trying to write for college instructors that have a great deal more demands for the content and structure of their writing. The demands for these students changes and they might struggle to adapt much they same way I have struggled to adapt my writing.

I have not been successful at fluently picking up another language. I completed a few years of French but I can't speak or write it very well. During my first semester at MSU I took Spanish with a fellow who is perhaps the worst instructor I have had in any class ever. More than half of my Spanish 101 class had taken 2 or more years of Spanish in High School, and a sizable plurality of these folks had taken 4 years of Spanish, there were even a few students who took AP Spanish. The philosophy of the instructor who resembled an Argentinean Steven Colbert has a poor command of English and adopted the teaching philosophy that: because there are very advanced students alongside Spanish Novi, that he should teach somewhere to the middle. Frustrated, I dropped the class.

Because my degree requires that I take two years of a foreign language, I will be starting Portuguese in the fall of 2008. I hope that I won't have to stand out against too many students with a background in Portuguese.

Alas, I can empathie with an ESL student who is expected to learn English by immersion. They no doubt deal with frustrated native English speakers on a regular basis the same way I was met with frustration by advanced Spanish students and the Argentinean Steven Colbert.

I have never failed to start an assignment because of a fear of failure, but there are many times when I failed to start a project because I feared spending my time on something agonizing and unstimulating.

Like virtually every other restless and irreverent young white male boy, I was diagnosed with A.D.H.D. I will say that this is about all I want to discuss in regards to my mental health and cognitive capacity on a public blog.