When I came to Michigan State it was a big change. I had always been to a school with a lot of people, my graduating class was around 570, but here it was different. There was a lot more people that were different and did there own thing, rather than everyone being the same. While I was meeting new people, there were words that people used here that I didn't even know about, such as "pop" or "caf". Where I'm from everyone calls it "coke" or a "cafeteria". I'm still to this day never saying the word "pop". There were also a lot of double negatives being used when people were speaking. I think the speech up here is faster and more careless of grammar. I don't think this is wrong at all, just different from what I grew up around. Here at MSU, people would comment on my accent being funny, and I noticed an accent of people from Michigan. I would talk slower and people would automatically think that I was racist or uneducated. This went on for a little while, until I noticed that I stopped noticing my accent and the accent of other people around me. It seems like here at school I speak differently then I do at home. Not because of the fear of people labeling me a "southern racist", but because when someone is in a different environment they naturally change and pick up the different language around them.
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
DW1.a
Being from the suburbs of southeast Texas, we were taught to speak the correct language that we learned in school. It was a very conservative place, and also very competitive. When we first learned how to read, we were expected to speak in complete sentences like the books were written. Not saying that everyone did this to the fullest extent, just that it was expected of us all. This was not really a burden on us because it would be like learning any language, it just happened to be the standard White English. It was a well to do place, as in people had a lot of money. Most people looked down on the parents and you if you did not hold your conversations well. This went for the black kids as well. There weren't a lot of minorities where I grew up, and there was a real lack of diversity. There was not a lot of difference in culture. I remember one black boy I went to elementary school with would always wear a suit and come with a briefcase. Maybe it was because of the pressure of the environment to change. Everyone was taught to be the same and if you were different you were labeled. It wasn't uptight or anything because we all used slang and words such as "ain't" and "y'all", but the structure of the sentences we were saying were always under scrutiny from our parents and teachers. This would be at home and school.
When I came to Michigan State it was a big change. I had always been to a school with a lot of people, my graduating class was around 570, but here it was different. There was a lot more people that were different and did there own thing, rather than everyone being the same. While I was meeting new people, there were words that people used here that I didn't even know about, such as "pop" or "caf". Where I'm from everyone calls it "coke" or a "cafeteria". I'm still to this day never saying the word "pop". There were also a lot of double negatives being used when people were speaking. I think the speech up here is faster and more careless of grammar. I don't think this is wrong at all, just different from what I grew up around. Here at MSU, people would comment on my accent being funny, and I noticed an accent of people from Michigan. I would talk slower and people would automatically think that I was racist or uneducated. This went on for a little while, until I noticed that I stopped noticing my accent and the accent of other people around me. It seems like here at school I speak differently then I do at home. Not because of the fear of people labeling me a "southern racist", but because when someone is in a different environment they naturally change and pick up the different language around them.
When I came to Michigan State it was a big change. I had always been to a school with a lot of people, my graduating class was around 570, but here it was different. There was a lot more people that were different and did there own thing, rather than everyone being the same. While I was meeting new people, there were words that people used here that I didn't even know about, such as "pop" or "caf". Where I'm from everyone calls it "coke" or a "cafeteria". I'm still to this day never saying the word "pop". There were also a lot of double negatives being used when people were speaking. I think the speech up here is faster and more careless of grammar. I don't think this is wrong at all, just different from what I grew up around. Here at MSU, people would comment on my accent being funny, and I noticed an accent of people from Michigan. I would talk slower and people would automatically think that I was racist or uneducated. This went on for a little while, until I noticed that I stopped noticing my accent and the accent of other people around me. It seems like here at school I speak differently then I do at home. Not because of the fear of people labeling me a "southern racist", but because when someone is in a different environment they naturally change and pick up the different language around them.
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What specific comparisons might you make with yoru written language?
ReplyDeleteI can see that you used compare and contrast for your strategy for your DW1a. This strategy could work for Project 1, by comparing life back home to life here at MSU, which are very different, as you explained.
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