Dis-course Runs its Course

In all honesty I arrived in college with a firm conviction that I would be doing most of the talking due to my inherent genius. The only talking that the faculty would be doing would be in agreement or adulation of my own greatness, or to spend the first week or so telling me what I didn’t know (which of course was very little) and the rest would be as aforementioned. I suppose this isn’t much different from a hyperinflated teenager ego, but what can I say, I confess to falling into the same pitfalls as my predecessors. Or at least the same pitfalls as some of them.

However, I had some inkling of how to participate in discourse from my father. He told me, when I was quite young, a saying concerning college: “During your first year, you learn to say ‘yes.' During your second year, you learn to say ‘no.' During your third year, you learn to say ‘it depends.’ ” And he would always leave it at that. I, of course, completely misunderstanding him, thought I’d start with “It depends” from the get-go, without any of the steps necessary beforehand and “out-think” the system. This, of course, didn’t work, due to several varying factors. But, I suppose I had a dim understanding of how it worked to begin with.

In any event, after a long and debilitating period of personal problems, I came to the final realization that there is rarely a right or wrong answer to many things. There is one right answer to some (2+2 will always = 4), and there are some which have as many “right” answers as people you ask (What is justice?). My years spent in college also taught me how to tell the difference between the two, most of the time. These years also taught me that, for many things, there is no answer available, and sometimes you need to search for the truth alone.

The process of making discourse within a classroom environment, with the teacher and my peers, was part of the process of growing up, for me. As a homeschooler, and one obsessively focused on a few things at any given time, I confess that I was a little late coming out of the social-development gate on many different things. As a result, it took me a little longer to learn a lot of things I should’ve learned earlier. When I grew up, it was then, and only then, that I learned that the world isn’t black and white, and that the stream of conscious information does not always flow in one direction or another. Information is a two-way stream of ideas and opinions, ever shifting and as effervescent as a torrential river. Although I had known of the way things should’ve been done (the saying my father told me earlier), I hadn’t understood the deeper meaning behind it. I still don’t, but at least I know I’m not full of the “right” information. The mark of true knowledge, as is often said, is when you know how very little you know. For me, discourse was part of the coming of age process, and though I’m not necessarily any better for it, I am, hopefully, a little wiser because of it.

EDIT: Okay, well, after class today I guess I totally misunderstood the prompt, so I'll try and add some additional information to salvage it. Talking in the language of a group, the given language, so that you can be understood and have a meaningful conversation within a "discourse community" is something I understood on an intuitive level, but not until recently did I really understand it consciously. But I think I learned it from an early age, how different groups of people say different things to different people (if that made any sense), so it was intuitive for me, and so not really all that hard to grasp.