Blog #5

When I think about my life and my transition from home to college, it's crazy how much I can relate to Vicki Madden's Why Poor Students Struggle. I grew up in a single parent household from the age of 6 until I left home and although we weren't poor poor, we weren't the richest either. I had a roof over my head and food to eat, provided by my mother's 2 jobs, but we were nowhere near the middle class. And like many other families from low socioeconomic backgrounds, we made it work.

I come from a predominantly Black and Hispanic neighborhood and that is exactly what my entire k-12 life was...Black people and Hispanic/Latino people. The culture that I was immersed in growing up was vast however. I didn't just stay in my neighborhood year round ☺. I’ve been to the 90210, Orange County, China town, out of state, and many other places where I experienced different cultures. But it’s one thing to visit and another entirely to live there. Which is what I found out when I came to college, LOL. Talk about culture shock! Madden says that “the more elite the school, the wider the gap,” (Madden 3) and although SDSU is no Ivy League school, when I came here, it might as well have been.

Entering into the discourse community that is college, I had to learn what the expectations of language, popular slang, academic knowledge, college jargon, and all the other fun stuff that come with being thrown into the deep end entailed. There’s an “unspoken transaction: trading your old world for a new world, one that doesn’t seem to value where you came from” (Madden 4) and that is definitely true especially coming to a school where your race is like 4%. Discourse communities want you to assimilate to whatever culture that community has already set in place. So there was definitely that tug of war on my psyche of what am I doing here? Do I even need college? Of course you need college, Maiya, no one’s gonna take you seriously without a degree! But it’s so expensive! I don’t fit in here at all, like 75% of the school are blonde, white girls. I’m gonna be like the only Black girl in all my classes! What if Financial Aid doesn’t cover everything, I don’t have the money to stay here! If that conversation that I had (entirely in my head btw and went on for much longer) seems very real, it’s because it is. Like Madden said, “If you don’t have $700, it might as well be a million.”

Despite the many struggles I encountered during my transition, one of the most common was changing the language from what I was used to using at home to what was more acceptable for university life, much like, but in many different ways different from what Amy Tan talks about in Mother Tongue. I’m a black girl so I grew up in an English speaking household, but much like Tan explains, I had to decide which of my Englishes were suited for which situations. Mostly socially, rather than academically, I mean I went to high school and wrote academic papers before, so that wasn’t really the issue, but I had different slang that was used in my household that I kind of just assumed everyone else would know. For example, my apartment manager put a note on the door explaining that the water was going to be turned off for a certain time because they were going to be working on the pipes. I was the first to see the note so I told my housemates (who are not Black), “don’t cut the water on, they’re gonna work on the pipes.” Naturally, one would assume that through context clues, the message that I was trying to convey was clear…don’t turn the water on. BUT, apparently using the word ‘cut’ in place of ‘turn’ is not normal. They all stood there and were like “What does that mean, “don’t cut it on?” and “why’d you say “cut?”” I’ve been in college for 3 years and still haven’t figured everything out apparently *Kanye Shrug*. When I go home however, I don’t worry about how I speak or how what I say will be translated in the minds of my family because they speak the same English that I do.

So there are many reasons that poor students struggle, aside from the obvious financial issue and that’s what I love about Vicki Madden’s explanation because “it’s often the subtler things, the signifiers of who they are that cause the most trouble” (3). Language especially, because people view language as a signifier of how intelligent a person may be, like Amy Tan explains numerous times regarding her mother. But, you know what they say…fake it ‘til you make it.