Blog 4.

Gergen opened up a lot of thinking for me in relation to my research. Despite my findings in my transcript and during my interview, where school was a pleasant experience where I received a lot of validation for my skill, I still feel that only a small fraction of the classroom experience was responsible for my actual learning to write.  Rather, I learned that there were different "formats" for writing--different tricks and nuances that were learned for social acceptance that were in themselves not exercises for writing, but for molding the vessels that contain it.  Looking back on my growing data and my memories, I felt like it was the way you learn to use a different set of table manners for home vs. not home; a different discourse.  I learned how to write a limerick here, how to dot-and-jot class notes there; outlines, five paragraph essays, literary criticism, analysis.  I learned formulas, valuable formulas at that,but not writing.

Writing I learned from the non-traditional spaces--and I learned a completely different set of code and conduct for writing there than from at school--in online forums and multiplayer games, paper and pencil roleplays, fanfiction sites, the books I read, how people in my life responded to my writing--the list goes on.  While I learned in school that plagiarism would get me expelled and the first two lines of a limerick should rhyme==>I learned "outside" that it's in poor taste to go out of character in fanfiction just to satisfy one's desires, and feelings can transfer from a person to the word to another person and that's part of what draws in readers, how to keep some writing private and others shared--these and countless other lessons are things I value primarily, while academia is secondary.

However, these "outside" lessons were also taught "inside" at times and vice versa.   I still saw the academic environment as an authority, something I answered to and sought approval from, but at the same time my loyalty was often highly selective and I would dismiss judgment from my teachers about one set of writing while obeying when it came to another set--like academic papers.  For example, I was far more concerned with what my online friends and roleplay partners thought about my latest original fantasy chapter than the opinion of my teachers, if they ever even knew I was working on such a thing.

Am I holding "outside" learning superior to what I learned in the academic environment?  Do I want to dismiss the academic and focus on that outside space where is no authority or good/bad writing?  Probably.  But that is only how I have been shaped how I shape my assumptions; even as I say so, I feel that I'm highly over-generalizing that shape in this post by turning myself into an explainable character, as I've learned to try and do.   I realize that there are also limitations to that mindset I might never overcome, and others will undoubtedly have different values and skill sets.