Here’s a pet peeve about school.
Language and identity have three connections - symbolic (language says who we are), instrumental (language enables us to do things), and constructive (language can be used for creation)
When you know a language well enough to express yourself in it, you can re-interpret yourself through the use of it
REALLY?! Whoa! I didn’t know that if you know a language well enough, you can, uh, re-interpret yourself through it! Good thing I learned this obvious fact that I will throw away but be tested on.
Not so much re-interpreting yourself just by using ANY language, but that if you learn Spanish and start speaking exclusively Spanish, it’ll change your identity the more you use it. This doesn’t sound like much, but for the Kurdish bloggers he was studying (while I didn’t take notes on it, it’s basically illegal to use Kurdish in every country where it has a native population), to publicly use their mother tongue is a huge thing for their identity.
This class is pretty slack and we don’t get tested on stuff like that. We had a fill-in the blank section on our test (pick one of 14 words to fill 10 blanks) which was worth as much as the two short answer questions. We had one question on the other guest lecture we had on the test, but it was just a random thing.
The idea, though, is to give free marks to people who show up and don’t sleep in class. Sad but true. The more obscure you go with your questions, the higher you’re aiming those free marks - like, you’re either rewarding the people who show up, or the people who take good notes, or the people who take PERFECT notes.
This is also fodder for the papers we’re going to write in a couple of weeks. Whether for quoting or for expanding on.
And, truth be told, stuff that I jotted down like that was just poor note taking on my part. Grabbing what’s on the slides instead of what comes out of his mouth. But he kinda rushed through that part a bit and I was like eh well I’ll describe this as best I can… But I’ll be trying to fill things out when I get his slides.
So that’s my response which doesn’t change anything but there’s what I have to say.