TRAPPED

Girl at Gate
.
State Library & Archive of Florida
1885-1910

While I was teaching Composition at the four-year non-traditional college, one particular woman was having an unusual difficulty. She never spoke in class. I had only assigned light papers with quick topics, and her writing was confused and confusing. I began to wonder if she was stupid.

Then came the first major paper. She asked to speak to me alone. She tried to describe to me what her paper was going to be about, but she was almost incoherent. She spoke in phrases that did not connect to each other but piled up.



It took me awhile to interpret even part of what she was saying. But I was struck by how interesting it was,  high-level philosophical thought, the kind of intellectual lattice of ideas that I would expect from the students I myself had gone to school with. Phrase by phrase, I began to decipher the meaning of her jumbled, half-expressed words. What emerged was an intellectual and philosophical mind.

It was then that I realized her problem. Her thoughts were actually too complex for her limited language and expressive skills. As a woman from the ghetto, she had grown up in an environment that did not give her the language skills to express what was in her. In other words, her mind worked independently of her language. She was having thoughts with no language and no way to get it out.

I have to admit that until I realized this, I had judged people by the way they expressed themselves. I had believed that the way people talked was the way they thought. In my life, I placed a high value on eloquence. I thought poor language skills meant poor thinking skills.

From now on, I am more open. When I have a student who cannot express herself, I listen carefully to her ideas. I had seen a clear example of how one's culture and education have little to do with what a person has accomplished intellectually. Now I know there are many high-level thinkers out there who have thoughts more complex than their language.

--And the irony is, since language is independent of thought, since language reflects only one's culture and education, that means there are also many people out there who are very eloquent, but have nothing interesting to say.