Text-to-Self: This connection to Discourses is very important. Gee is trying to get across that Discourses are not simply writing and reading, but much much more. It every aspect from the clothes you were to the way you speak. Discourses are a combination of everything that makes you you, or everything that makes someone else themselves. A specific Discourse for me that I had to learn this year was being a roommate. Me and my roommates get along great, but it was learned. You have to be careful of how you dress and talk. You cant act the same with roommates as you do to your family. You deal with different things as roommates and its all connected. From how you talk, to how you wake up, to who you bring in. Being a roommate is a much different Discourse than home living. You have to watch out for roommates, be good to each other, but not hold down. Its a constant balance of keeping their best interest and keeping your boundaries. It goes even to as simple as food. With roommates you share food or you don’t, and if you don’t and you break that its a real problem. Roommates are their own Discourse because you don’t ever act as you do with roommates as with others.

Text-to-Self: Back at home I have multiple Discourses that do not exactly line up, and every time they have there are problems. Once I started working I started meeting new people, people older than me. I started hanging out with people I never knew I would meet, but with them life was different, the Discourse was different. They way I talked and acted with them wouldn’t work at home. I couldn’t talk to my mom they way I talked to my friends of course, and when you let things slip that is when they meld and mix. My life consisted of acting as I always had at home, and then acting as I wanted during and after work. I learned a lot from splitting them instead of mixing them. It helped me learn to have a better split between personal and family, and another between personal and professional. Over time though the mix of the two became closer and closer, and getting to college kind of finally put them as one Discourse. My back home one, even though both are separate parts of my life there

Text-to-Text: In Jordan’s article her students react to the passage very differently than how Jordan expected. The students had been taught from a young age that the English “Discourse” is meant to be eloquent, writing is supposed to be in perfect language. Yet as they talk about how weird the writing in the passage sounds they are describing it in almost the same type of tongue. As Jordan says “I wanted not to make them self-conscious about their own spoken language–.” The US has made sure that throughout time English is dominant as “White English”, no slurs, no fake words, no shortening. But that is not the true English Discourse. English Discourse includes everything. The things we say, our accent. All words are made up, yet if it doesn’t “sound right” its shunned. In Jordan’s case her students failed to realize that they were critiquing how they speak while they critiqued the passage. As Gee said, Discourses are developed, and throughout our schooling we are taught to speak and write in America’s definition of perfect English, not in our own. That is to say that our culture, our accent, or our own sayings are not as important because they aren’t perfect. The problem with that is, nothing is perfect.