One of the most memorable moments in the first day that I took this class was when I was told that I could write however pleased me that I could use slang, make mistakes, and other things that didn’t coincide with the standard English that has been taught to me since the beginning. I was wondering why this was one of the first things told to us, then we started examining the attitudes towards linguistic standards that empower and oppress language users. We looked at different forms of media such as speeches, videos, poems, and essays that talked about the person’s personal experience with language and how they went about it. I related to some of the topics brought up such as Amy Tan’s “Mother Tongue” and Lozada-Olivia’s video “My Spanish.” I say “some” because not everyone’s experiences with language are the same and I could not relate to experiences like Safwat Saleem and his stuttering, however that did not stop me from drawing from my own experiences and forming a connection. “I [..] liked hearing other people’s experiences with language because even though they weren’t the same experiences that I went through I was still able to relate to them”.
While looking at the different forms of media in which others expressed themselves it did not feel like one way was the right way to express language politics. Each person that we investigated had their own takes and forms of expression that captivated who they are as a person as well as their emotions. We were tasked to have a form of visual representation for our essay, I went for a power point. I really enjoyed that part of my essay because I felt like I was able to help people visualize what I was talking about, especially when I felt like people would appeal to the visuals more.
My time in the class went mostly without a hitch until we were supposed to explore and analyze writing and readings with a variety of genres and rhetorical situations. As well as recognizing and practicing rhetorical strategies when engaged in writing situations. The thing that I struggled with was the rhetorical situations/strategies. This is mainly because I felt like I lacked in that aspect because I have struggled with English and even when I did have a decent education, I did not grasp anything until my final two years of middle school. I came to this class thinking I was knowledgeable enough, however when people started to use words like pathos and ethos it threw me off and I felt like I was behind everyone else. This lack of fundamental knowledge grew with identifying rhetorical situations because I have not really learned what that meant and what it exactly was. It felt difficult because I barely understood the concept, however that did not stop me from trying my best in doing the assigned work and trying to understand.
Throughout the course, we wrote a couple of essays. When drafting essays editing, revising, drafting, and collaborating are essential to creating a great essay. This part of the process is quite simple to me because I have my own personal tried and true system for editing even if it is just the first draft. While on the outside if I were to explain to someone how I go about editing my writing may seem very sloppy, but it is very helpful as it gets the job done and I don’t have to stress myself about writing countless drafts and has even helped me just create one good singular draft that could easily be turned into a good final draft when the final editing is done. I also really liked getting feedback from my peers because while I already had thought about the points that they bring up it makes me happy to know that I am on the right track with my editing progress. Even when I was confused on a certain aspect of my writing, it still felt nice to know that my peers are there to help me get on the right track especially in the peer profile because “I was struggling with the start of the essay, [and] when my essay was reviewed it got good comments and felt like I did a decent enough job for my first time writing a peer profile”.
In 2015 Donal Trump said this “They’re taking our jobs, they’re taking our manufacturing jobs, they’re taking our money, they’re killing us” (Benen, 2015. Boak, 2019). This quote is from one of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns around July 2015. This argument that immigrants take American jobs has been going around for many years around as late 1960s-70s. I want to discuss whether this argument is statistically true or if this argument is indeed just for political gain to persuade those who do not know the actual economics and numbers behind this claim. The reason for this is because if the argument is unfound and only for political gain then it is very detrimental. Many Immigrants who are deported cannot take their children under eighteen with them which is very mentally and emotionally damaging to those children. I experienced that fear as a child worried that because of the increase support on Donald Trump and his campaign against immigrants, I was worried that I would lose a parent or an aunt even if they have been residents for the required years. That argument only helped Donald Trump persuade his audience and gain political favor however is what he and others have said true. Based on the results it should become clear that immigrants do not steal jobs of Americans and immigration can help the U.S. economy.
To determine whether immigrants do take American or U.S. citizen jobs we first need to look at the job demographics or the average percentage of what kind of jobs do Americans or native-born citizens accept and the percentage of non-native born, or immigrants accept. As well as the general demographics are in those given jobs. The EPI report “Racial representation in professional occupations” issued in 2021 shows us what we need to know. In figure 1, it shows the overall average for all jobs that it was considering with the total workforce for white being 61.4%, Black with 12.8%, Latinx 17.4%, and AAPI (with respect to this study refers to non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic Blacks, and non-Hispanic Asian Americans/Pacific islanders) with 7.4%. The figure then goes on to show the percentages for more specific jobs like Management, computer and mathematical science, architecture and engineering, and community and social service occupations (Wilson, 2021). Looking at the data over all the categories White rangers from highest being 79.8% in legal occupations, and their lowest being 60.8% in community and social service occupations. For Black the highest is 20.5% in community and social service and the lowest being 5.9% in architecture and engineering. Latinx with a 12.8% in community and social service and 6.2% in legal occupations, respectively. Finally, with AAPI with a 17.1% in life, physical, and social science and a 4.6% in community and social services (Wilson, 2021). Across the occupations shows in the table White people assume a hefty portion of the total workforce even within the specific fields. Another study from Pew Research Center, “A majority of Americans say immigrants mostly fill jobs U.S. citizens do not want” went into the percentage that immigrants fill. The article states “Americans generally agree that immigrants – whether undocumented or living legally in the country – mostly do not work in jobs that U.S. citizens want [with] about three-quarters of adults (77%) say undocumented immigrants mostly fill jobs U.S. Citizens do not want, while 21%” they do (Krogstad, 2020). The first figure shows the percentage of those who say whether they believe immigrants accept jobs Americans want or do not want. Overall, the percentage shows that most can agree that immigrants accept jobs U.S citizens do not want and in total with 72% democrats or lean democrats and 54% republicans or lean republicans believing that immigrants take jobs U.S. citizens do not want (Krogstad, 2020). In the third figure it shows the percentage of labor force each demographic takes up with U.S. born making up a total of 82.5% of the total U.S labor force. Legal immigrants assume 12.9% and unauthorized immigrants taking up the final 4.6% of the total U.S. labor force (Krogstad, 2020). With this information we can derive that while immigrants do assume a portion of the labor force it is not a great extent to what it is believed to be, and U.S. citizens assume most of the demographic and labor force.
What does this mean for the U.S. economy. First, we need to consider wages. According to EPI, in table 3 it shows that even in the same profession a racial wage gap is present. While the reason is another topic it does not change that this does affect people’s wages which is important to consider if immigrants are taking U.S. citizens jobs and hurting the economy. In the table across the years from 2017-2019 the median weekly earnings in the total workforce are $965 for Whites, $702 for Black people, $673 for Hispanics, and $1,042 for AAPI (Wilson, 2021). This shows us that while it is not specifically determined what percent of the Black, Hispanic, and AAPI are immigrants this still shows that there is a wage gap and does not support the statement that immigrants are taking U.S. citizens money. On the topic of wages looking at an old study from 2012, “What Immigration Means for U.S. Employment and Wages”, as the title suggests it discusses what kind of affect immigration has on wages and employment. According to the essay, in a survey it was found that economists do not find that immigrants cause any significant decrease in wages and employment of U.S. citizens. Instead, economists believed that immigrants could help raise wages and lower prices. The article goes on to say that one of the reasons behind the economist’s reason is because U.S. born workers and immigrants do not compete for the same jobs. This can be confirmed by the demographics presented before as well as the figure that showed people believe that immigrants take jobs Americans do not want (Greenstone, 2012). “Another way in which immigrants help U.S. workers is that businesses adjust to new immigrants by opening stores, restaurants, or production facilities to take advantage of the added supply of workers […] Because of these factors, economists have found that immigrants sightly raise the average wages of all U.S. born workers” (Greenstone, 2012). While studying the effect of immigration on wages it was determined that while immigration does improve living standards there is still division on whether immigration reduces wages for certain workers, with two studies looking into level of education of the immigrants and how much they affect wages. One study finding that from 1990 to 2006 immigrant workers reduced low-skilled wages by 4.7% while the second study found that immigrants raise the wages of U.S. citizens regardless of educational level (Greenstone, 2012). This helps us understand that immigrants do not have a negative impact on the U.S. employment opportunities and wages, however this is a study from 2012 and things could have changed from then and now.
To further determine whether these findings could be true we can look at what an earlier study/thesis by Carol O. Bruce-Tagoe found. The study looked at the relationship between its variables of unemployment, immigration, college competition, inflation, and real GDP (Gross Domestic Product). In page 36, it showed that table 6, for the Hausman test accepted the null hypothesis test and the results from the unemployment growth and the dependent variable in table 5 had equivalent results (Bruce-Tagoe, 2022). This then implied that there was no significant difference across the seven states looked at in the study. Later in page 42, the results for its wage model showed that the p-value of the Hausman test passed the null hypothesis of random effect (Bruce-Tagoe, 2022). Page 45 then goes on to state “by focusing on seven states (containing key gateway cities) with the highest proportion of immigrants, the study expects the true impact of immigration growth on unemployment and wages growth rate […] Per the pooled OLS estimation result, immigration showed a positive but insignificant effect on the unemployment rate […] Similarly, immigration’s impact on the growth of wages in the U.S. reveals a positive but statistically insignificant effect [with this information it was concluded that] the growth in immigration has no substantial impact on the US labor market” (Bruce-Tagoe). This study correlates with what the previous study in 2012 found, this is significant because this proves that immigrants do not have a substantial negative impact on the U.S. economy and labor market and in fact could improve it in small but significant ways than it was predetermined.
However, some may be wonder how immigrants can help the economy, wages, and employment when the stigma is that immigrants are uneducated. Kellog insight “Immigrants to the U.S. Create More Jobs than They Take” talks about a study by Jones and his colleagues Pierre Azoulay, Daniel Kim, and Javier Miranda who are from MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Census Bureau, respectively. They looked at the contribution immigrants imposed as both employees and founders, focusing on the numbers and sizes of the companies. Looking at the size of the companies founded is important because a small business would not create enough jobs to cause a huge job creation effect. However, if it is a big company then it becomes significant. Looking through three datasets the first in which was from the “U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Data, which included information on every business founded between 2005 and 2010 that lasted for five years” (Azoulay, 2020). However, that dataset while it was detailed and had a large sample size, it only included recent businesses, so the second dataset included more older companies with a sample size of “200,000 firms from the U.S. Census Survey of Business Owners” (Azoulay, 2020). The third and final dataset the researchers used the 2017 Fortune 500 that represents the largest firms in the U.S. With these three datasets the researchers found that immigrants founded firms at a higher rate than native born citizens. The article states “0.83 percent of immigrants in the workforce between 2005-2010 started a firm, while just 0.42 percent of U.S. born ones did. The survey data, which also considers older and more stable firms, found that 7.25 percent of immigrants were entrepreneurs, compared with about 4 percent of native-born individuals” (Azoulay, 2020). These businesses not only created more jobs in a wide range of business sizes, but the researchers also found that the businesses were more innovative given immigrant firms were more likely to have patents than U.S. born founded firms. Among other things, it was found by looking at the wages paid by the firms between 2005-2010 that “immigrant-founded firms pay somewhat higher wages than native-founded firms” (Azoulay, 2020). Another study from JEC backs up these findings. Looking at data from before and after the pandemic the study first looked at the ratio between employment and population for immigrants and U.S. citizens. The first figure showing data from 2010 to 2020 that between February and April 2020 there was an increase in unemployment and immigrants were more likely to be actively employed by July 2020 and as of today “about 64% of foreign-born workers are actively employed-strengthening the ongoing economic recovery and helping alleviate pressures that cause inflation-compared to about 59% of native-born workers” (“The Contributions”, 2022). The second figure showed data from 2010-2020 the labor force participation rates and it showed that immigrants are more likely to be participating in the labor force than U.S. citizens. However, in the data its shows a shortfall of immigrant workers with there being about 1.7 million fewer working-age immigrants “relative to the number expected if pre-pandemic immigration trends continued” and because of this shortfall it is hurting the U.S. economy and labor market. The third figure went more detailed into the pre 2020 working immigrant trend and the actual trend from 2010-2022 (“The Contributions”, 2022). The figure showed the shortfall which has been increasing since its fall around 2020 but has not reached the pre 2020 trend line. The study then states, “the decline is partly explained by efforts to mitigate virus transmission during the pandemic, it is also the result of former President Trump’s extreme and highly restrictive immigration policies” (“The Contributions”, 2022). Later in page 8, the researcher goes to state that immigrants were more likely to be entrepreneurs and start their own businesses and that while immigrants assume 14% of the population “they create about 25% of new firms. In 2021, more than 41% of Fortune 500 companies in the United States were founded by an immigrant or child of an immigrant” (“The Contributions”, 2022). Immigrants have been deemed dangerous and uneducated however while some are that doesn’t apply to all and this information shows that immigrants make a variety of firms which create more jobs and they are more likely to be working thus contributing to wages and the economy but because of increased immigration restrictions it has come to negatively impact the U.S. economy.
As stated, with the increased immigration prevention policies put in place it has negatively impacted the United States. Brookings’ “Do immigrants “steal” jobs from American workers” talks about this in a more detailed manner, with a quote from Felbab-Brown, who is an American expert in internal and international organized crime as well as a senior fellow for the 21st Century Security and Intelligence in the Foreign Policy Program, where she argues “fixing immigration is not about mass deportations of people but about creating a legal visa system for jobs Americans do not want” which are more physically demanding, “it is about providing better education opportunities, skills-development and retooling, and safety nets for American workers. And to date, Trump hasn’t offered serious policy proposals on many-if any-of those areas” (Hoban, 2017). Trump has proposed to cut quotas for illegal immigration in half and William Frey, a noted American demographer and author as well as research professor at the University of Michigan’s Population Studies Center, argues that the proposals made would “fly in the face of census statistics” because the immigration levels are important to the growth of America and more recent arrivals are more educated than past years and it is unnecessary to try prioritizing highly skilled immigrants when “college graduates are more prevalent among recent immigrant adults than among all adults in 90 of the 100 largest metropolitan areas” (Hoban, 2017). The article goes on to say that by cutting on immigration like Trump has proposed America would miss out on the possibility of new inventions that could generate jobs the very thing former President Trump was striving to achieve, this is mainly because immigrants account “for around a quarter of entrepreneurs and a quarter of investors in the U.S. and that over one third of new firms have at least one immigrants entrepreneur in its initial leadership team” (Hoban, 2017). While the ethics about immigration as somewhat intertwined with this topic this essay will not go into it, rather what we learn from this information is that immigration should be regulated enough to where immigrants could still come into the U.S and help the economy and still regulate it enough where immigrants have to work to get into the U.S. and not mass deport working and (something) citizens.
Throughout this essay I covered topics to help prove my initial claim that immigrants do not “steal” jobs and can positively impact America. The first part of the argument was that immigrants are taking U.S. citizen jobs. It was evident that while there are immigrants in the U.S., native born Americans took a majority percentage in job demographics. A survey showed that Americans and immigrants believed that immigrants take the jobs U.S. citizens do not want, this is mainly because immigrants are more likely to compete for more labor demanding jobs rather than U.S. citizens. Not to mention, immigrants help create more jobs because it has been shown that immigrants are more likely to participate in job-multiplier firms/companies. This then helps rebuke the second part of the argument which is that immigrants negatively affect the U.S. economy. While it is not significant, given that immigrants are a contributor to creating a wide variety of firms and they are more likely to be employed than native born citizens it can be deduced that immigrants positively affect the economy. Even when immigrants have been positively affecting the U.S. there is a fall because of the pandemic as well as increased immigration restrictions imposed and proposed by former President Trump which is slowing down the economic recovery and negatively affecting the U.S. Immigrants are helpful in their respective ways and their contributions should not be overlooked because of stereotypes or wanting more political gain.
In my research essay I go into lots of numbers and statistics which help to support the topic that I am looking into which is ‘do immigrants steal jobs’. My audience is generally political figures who are either for or against immigrants and immigration as well as the general population so they can be informed and can draw their own conclusions on the data even if the data does point towards one “answer”. The reason I am doing this topic is because I want to bring knowledge to people who fall into headline bias or listen to any possible misinformation and don’t do their own personal research on the topic and take the information as fact. While it does seem like people have come to question the validity of what government officials say there are still a plenty majority who don’t. While this research essay topic is somewhat personal most of the statistics and research citied are from the government and organizations.
I am very proud of how during the peer review I was told that my what I wrote flowed well. I am proud of this because I was very skeptical about the way I wrote things and if they correlated in some way and that it was easy to read and understand and not just jumping from one topic to the next.
I would like the person that I wrote about to read it so they can see how I viewed them from the small interview that we had and from just by reading her narrative, and if I captured her in the correct light. I believe that people who have had similar experiences like her need to read this because it could give some sort of comfort that they aren’t alone in feeling the way that they feel or that they aren’t alone with their experiences. I also believe that teachers especially those who know that they have a student who has trouble understanding English and whose parents also have trouble understanding as well, to empathize with them and adjust to their need by just incorporating some translation underneath the questions that they have.
This essay helped me really understand the layers and complexities that there are in language and not just the common or relatable parts of not being able to understand how to speak/write in any language.
Allison Andrade
10/14/23
Peer Profile
Jason Lobell
Jennifer Galindo, whose heritage goes all the way back to Mexico, from her mother who immigrated from there to America. Now living in America, she and her mother faced many challenges, one of those challenges was language. Since, Jennifer’s mother was born in Mexico it meant that she was a non-English speaker so she could only speak Spanish, unlike her daughter who is growing up in a mixed English and Spanish environment. She was encountering English whenever she would go outside and to school and when she would go back home, she would be encountering Spanish. That mixture between Spanish and English was so predominant that she felt like she “constantly had a on and off switch with [her] Spanish and English”. This switching and having to translate everything in her head would become difficult when her mother who only was a non-English speaker was the only one capable of helping her with her homework. She recalls that she used to hate doing her homework because she would have to “remember everything [she] learned in English and translate it back to Spanish for [her] mom to understand”. She even gives more examples of how her mother would tell her English problems to solve but she would say them in Spanish so Jennifer would have to translate what she heard and write it in English and translate it to Spanish for her mother to understand what she wrote. This became difficult when she didn’t understand a word in Spanish or when there were extra words and lettering in a Spanish sentence that made a worded math problem extremely difficult when she had learned an easier way to solve worded math problems in school. The constant switching and not being able to understand each other and different learning strategies for her and her mother clashed at times and the mother’s teaching methods would become very aggressive. She stated that her mother would just repeat the question but raising her voice louder after every time she would repeat the question. She would also become verbally aggressive by saying (translated) “how would you not know? do you not pay attention in school or what?” and (translated) “pay attention, you aren’t leaving until you finish your homework”. However, near the end of one of her paragraphs she expresses that she felt like those experiences and challenges were necessary for both to get better.
In the interview she explained that while it was a little difficult at first to figure out a moment to talk about in her narrative after thinking deeply about the topic, she felt like that moment was the best to talk about because not only was it memorable for her but because she felt like it played a very important role in her life and shaped her into who she is today. She states “Its something I always struggled with to till middle school […] doing homework with my mom was a bit traumatizing. Its what I hated and struggled the most as a kid growing up. I dread doing homework b/c of the challenges and endless hours of homework. Also growing up and seeing my siblings go through the exact same thing with my mom but a little less extreme reminded me of my childhood and I thought it would be perfect to write about”. This ties into how she feels her language affects others around her, she believes that it affects her siblings the most because they are going or went through similar experiences as her and she feels that because she has had experience she can help her mother and to lessen the stress and be able to help her siblings in any ways that her mother can’t or couldn’t when she was a kid. In her essay she even gives an example of her helping her little sister, where her sister was having an issue understanding a math problem and Jennifer instead of repeating the question and getting louder every time, she instructed her sister and showed her techniques and systems on how to solve the problem. She says, “these are things that I would have wanted my mom to do for me but because of her language barrier it was not possible”.
While all of this was stressful to her as a child, in the interview I asked her if her perspective changed as she was writing her essay and so it would seem it did. The reason being was because while she was writing her essay, she was recalling her memories of the event and while that was happening, she was seeing those memories as if from a third person point of view. She was able to see her memories in a wider frame rather than her past perspective when she was a kid. She stated, “I’m glad it changed my perspective because I could see now the different emotions and challenges my mom faces as well as mine”. She was able to see her parents, aunts, and especially her mothers’ perspectives on the matter more clearly and saw their own struggles. She felt that her mother’s teaching methods weren’t bad, and they really did help her in some ways. She even expressed that writing the dialogue was the best part of her writing, that without it, it wouldn’t have been as relatable to other Spanish kids and wouldn’t have tied the whole thing together. She also just enjoyed being able to recall the memory as accurately as she did because she felt like she was brought back to that moment and could hear her mother talking to her. It made her look at how things could’ve gone differently or what they could’ve done differently.
Now that she is older, she feels like she is glad in her standing is the English language even though she does feel like she had to sacrifice her Spanish to be able to understand English. She is willing and wants to get back in touch with her Spanish because while she knows she can carry conversations she has to “dumb down” some words because she can’t speak it proficiently enough to use more sophisticated words to sounds professional. She states that she knows how important it is to know how to speak Spanish in her family because most of them don’t speak English, she states that she “would feel pretty bad if [she] [wasn’t] able to communicate with them mainly b/c [she’s] lazy or don’t care to learn the language”.
Jennifer Galindo grew up with immigrant Spanish speaking parents and had to face many challenges with language along with her mother who was the one to help her with her homework. Homework that was the main root and cause of a lot of the challenges with her mother having to teach herself how to solve English problems and learn the correct pronunciations and grammar to then teach her own daughter something she had no prior knowledge on how to. Not to mention the struggle Jennifer had to understand what she heard her teacher say in class and remember it well enough to be able to translate it back to her mother so she could teach her and help her with homework problems. Through Jennifers experiences she felt like it made her build character and impacted who she is today as a person. It is noticeable that she is a very resilient person and through her experience she tries to make a difference for her siblings, so they don’t have to face what she faced.
I found that being able to see someone’s writing and actively interview them questions about them was very interesting. This not only allowed me to get to know someone that I’ve never known before on a deeper level, and I also let them know me on a deeper level. This was probably more sociably connecting for students because this connected them emotionally and they got to see each other differently than just a student/stranger in their class. This probably sparked many new friendships that could probably last till the end of college and after. The task was a little confusing for me at first because I had never written a peer profile before and it was very hard to find a way to start the essay when I had no blueprint or previous experience writing a peer profile. I am glad that even though I was struggling with the start of the essay, when my essay was reviewed it got good comments and felt like I did a decent enough job for my first time writing a peer profile. I do wish that if I had more experience, I would have written it more about who she is as a person rather than just stating things she said and tying it back to her narrative. Overall, I am glad that I was given this opportunity to connect with my peers and get to know them a little more.
I believe that writing is very important. It’s important because it has been used throughout history for many different reasons. One of the reasons writing is important is because it can capture history of events. One of the earliest forms of this was when people would write down transactions between each other, for example it would show that person A gave person B 5 sheep in exchange for 2 pigs. Writing has then been further used to precisely write down historical events rather than just transactions. Another reason writing is also used to help alleviate some sort of burden or to express emotion. That is why poetry and theater have been around for so long because people have found the use of writing as liberating and expressive. It gives them a medium in which they can say what they feel without telling other people. The idea had grown so big that psychologists and other professionals have done studies on whether writing can improve your mental health and it has been shown that it does. That is why not only therapists but people on social media have recommended writing in some sort of way. Even in media like television and movies show people having diaries, it shows that writing is very important and widely done by anyone in any sense. Writing can also reveal something about yourself that you haven’t seen before. Just like the saying “the eyes are the windows to the soul” I believe that writing is like that. It highlights stuff about yourself because when writing you are actively processing your thoughts to write it down on paper and to process your thoughts you have to have some sort of understanding. This is why everyone should at least give free writing a try, it could help you in more ways than one.
I found this phase really emotion and thought provoking. This is because while watching the videos and doing the readings provided, it really struck me personally because I related a lot to the topics and subtopics discussed in them. With the constant struggle with language and how people view others for the way they speak English specifically. I really liked these parts the most because it let me know that my experiences weren’t just my own and people have felt this way and experienced something similar, and it gave me some sort of comfort. I also liked being able to talk about my own experiences with my own issues and struggles with the English language that I had hardly ever talked about before with others. I also liked hearing other people’s experiences with language because even though they weren’t the same experiences that I went through I was still able to relate to them. This phase also really had me thinking of topics I had never really gave much thought to, like how it has been determined that if you don’t speak standard English then it is called “broken”. I had never really investigated the history or implications about just a simple label as “broken”. As well as its connection to how people perceive the “correct” way to speak English is, because while it has been right in front of my face the entire time, I never really paid attention to it. That there were these subtle underlining issues that are rarely addressed or shrouded by larger language issues. This course has been really helpful and made me actively think on a topic I probably never would have encountered had I been in a different English class.
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