After successfully completing 2-years of gifted high school level English, my first remedial English professor at U.C. Berkeley told me that I was writing at the 7th grade level. She told me that I needed to learn grammar and improve my vocabulary if I wanted to pass the Subject A exit exam. This was a shock but then I remembered that in high school English we were encouraged to write in basic sentences because our papers were easier to grade. We didn’t learn about independent and dependent clauses, sentence fragments, comma splice, run-on sentences, additive phrases, relative clauses, dangling modifiers or split infinitives; however, we did re-learn nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions continuously.
Now at U.C. Berkeley, I didn’t know how to correct the grammatical errors in my university level assignments because I was attempting to critically analyze these assignments with the grammatical knowledge of a 7th grader. My U.C. Berkeley counselor told me that if I didn’t pass the Subject A exit exam at the end of the spring term, I would be expelled from school. I didn’t want to fail; so, I set up another meeting with my professor to discuss my academic progress.
I arrived at The Dwinelle Annex building and went immediately to my professor’s office. He told me to come in and I took a seat across from him at his desk and watched him review my latest paper. He frowned, turned red, laid my paper on his desk, and stared at me. He started speaking and gradually his voice increased in volume and pitch until he was shouting at me. He told me he was tired of correcting my papers and that I was making the same grammatical errors. I explained to him that I needed help learning grammar and that the tutors on campus wouldn’t help me. I asked him, for the second time, to help me understand how to fix the grammatical errors. He told me he was not an elementary school teacher and he was not going to spend his time teaching me grammar. He told me that I didn’t need to submit anymore papers because he wasn’t going to grade them. He told me I wouldn’t ever learn how to write and that I was hopeless and useless. I started crying and he shouted at me to get out of his office. I got up and started for the door when I felt something strike my back. I stopped in shock and turned around to see what he threw at me. At my feet, I saw my balled up paper. “Get out and don’t come back!,” he shouted again.
I ran from the room crying. At nineteen years of age, I believed every word he shouted at me especially, “You will never learn how to write.”
After successfully completing 2-years of gifted high school level English, my first remedial English professor at U.C. Berkeley told me that I was writing at the 7th grade level. She told me that I needed to learn grammar and improve my vocabulary if I wanted to pass the Subject A exit exam. This was a shock but then I remembered that in high school English we were encouraged to write in basic sentences because our papers were easier to grade. We didn’t learn about independent and dependent clauses, sentence fragments, comma splice, run-on sentences, additive phrases, relative clauses, dangling modifiers or split infinitives; however, we did re-learn nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and conjunctions continuously. 