Language Investigation

Part 1:
Throughout my entire life I have had to learn to censor myself to my changing environments. I realized this at a young age due to my parents always telling me “you cannot say that here” or “that is not appropriate right now.” The first experience I had with having to censor myself was when my family was at church and I said I hated the chairs we had to sit in. My father grabbed my arm and said, “DO NOT use that word here.” I was only about four but I knew Jesus was about love and to say hate in the midst of him and his worshipers was wrong; however that night we were having peas with dinner and I said that I hated peas, but nobody cared that I used the word at all. In my later years I of course learned swear words, but I knew not to use them around my parents. I did, however, use them around my friends. I knew those words were not acceptable when used around your elders, in church, or in school.
In my past experiences with language there has been one word that I knew I had to censor, but it angered me to have to do so. Our legislation passing the bill for separation of church and state led to me having to steer around any biblical terms and phrases including God. I was raised catholic and to not be able to mention the lord whenever and wherever I wanted seemed like an atheist and hateful idea to me. When kids from the United States join exchange programs and go to other countries the other countries do not censor their religion just to make the tourists or other cultures happy. That is the only word that ever made me furious to have to censor out of my vocabulary in certain places.
As for terms that I use only in certain context, I use slang whenever I am talking it seems, but I never use it in my writing or when I am speaking with someone whom I know is judging me. When I am around friends or family I use phrases like “what up,” or “for sure,” or my most popular “see ya.” I do not use proper English or grammar when I am just hanging out with my friends; everything is trimmed down and lopped off. Half the time we do not even use complete sentences, what is the point my friends are not grading me on correctness or fluency.
No matter who you are or what you do you have different sets of speaking standards for every situation. No self-respecting human being would walk into church cursing the place out. No young adult is going to attempt to use perfect grammar when just hanging out with and talking to their friends. Everyone has a different form of vernacular for every situation of their existence.

Part 2:
In elementary school I can remember reading so many of those “Reading Rainbow” books. I was that kid who was quiet and studious and never talked out of turn or got out of line, as you can see times have changed me. Conventions, learning them
and learning to use them and applying them, my entire k-12 experience seems like a blur of writing strategies and rules. You have to draw letters from top to bottom, you have to write left to right, you have to, you have to, you have to. All throughout school it was about conformity; having to conform to the methods the teacher wanted to see. Topic sentence first, then explanatory sentences next, then a concluding sentence. That was the one and only paragraph format we were allowed to use; I am boring myself just writing about it.
I grew up in a predominantly white, blue collar, leftist community. When rules were set in the classroom they stood; no if, ands, or buts about it… the rules were set in stone. My teachers did not ever try to change things up or make them more interesting, it was all about get those definitions, standards, syntax, conventions, and so on in their heads and drill it till it never comes out. We had an autistic boy in our class and the teacher never addressed him, never changed her lesson plan to better fit him, the teachers seemed to treat him as a lost cause. I can still remember the color coding our teachers gave us for how to make the perfect paragraph; it was red-topic sentence, three yellow-explanatory sentences, and one green-concluding sentence. Conventions, conventions, conventions, I still have a hard time pushing those out of my head as I am writing. What always made me so angry in junior high and high school was when my teachers would mark my papers down for using but or is at the beginning of a sentence.
Apparently my teachers needed some more lessons on what good writing really is. I can understand them wanting to get the basis for good writing drilled into a child’s head, but when they sit there and tell those kids that is the only way to do it, they are crushing creativity. When I was in fifth grade I was reading and writing at a high school freshmen level; yet my teachers were still holding me to the fifth grade reading and writing standards and boring me right out of my mind. To be an affective teacher they needed to realize I was bored and make changes so that I did not become a devious, misbehaving child due to my boredom. They got lucky that my parents taught me better values than that or they would have had quite the hellion on their hands.
My experiences with writing in kindergarten through twelfth grade have given me the common basis for reading, writing, and comprehension, but in college professors want so much more. If I went to my 20th century British fiction class with a paper written in the five sentence paragraph, topic-explanatory-conclusion, no “is” or “but” beginning a sentence format…I am pretty positive my professor would rip that sucker up right in front of me. My basic literacy skills are thanks to k-12, but I did not get my sense of or ability to write like an adult until I took composition courses in college. It has been three years since I graduated high school and came to college, and yet I am still afraid to stray from what they taught me because if I ever did then they punished me for it. Now, however, in college if I do not stray I am punished for it. It is a duality, a complexity of two worlds both of which my mind seems to want to hang on to. I could be so much more of a phenomenal writer if I could just wash out my brain and get rid of third grade through twelfth grade.