Confession: Author's Note to "Language Discrimination in American Classrooms..."
"Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed."
-James 5:16 “Ah done growed ten feet higher jus’ listenin’ tuh you” (192).
-Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
During my sophomore year at Calvin College, I was hired by Student Academic Services to be an academic coach and tutor. I helped students who were on academic probation that struggled to write essays for their freshman English composition and core literature courses. One of the first students I ever worked with was a young, black woman who was failing English 101. I remember asking her to allow me to look at one of her graded essays. I was stunned to see that the entire front page was engulfed by red marks and a large, obtrusive “SEE ME!” at the top. There was no letter grade assigned. Her professor deemed her writing so “unintelligible” that he refused to even grade it.
For the next month or so, this student met with me every Thursday. She brought her weekly assignments with her so that I would critique them and she could edit them before turning them into her professor the next day. As a naïve and sometimes conceited English literature major, I tore her work to bits, slicing and dismantling each line. All the while, I took absurd amounts of pleasure in how knowledgeable, how thorough my understanding of the English language was. Toward the end of the semester, she and I were sitting together as I splattered ink here and there—she always used too many adjectives that were, to my view, only slight in nuance. I asked her to choose. She looked at me. She looked at my eyes, and I saw a tear forming in the corner of hers. She said to me, “You don’t understand.” Ignorant as I was, blind as I was, self-important as I was, I knew in my heart I had caused incredible harm.
That moment has never left me. Works Cited Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994. Print. Hurston, Zora N. Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper Perennial, 1937. 1-205. Print.