Blog #2: Suuuure, I Know What I'm Doing

According to James Paul Gee, we have all have discourses. In his work "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics Introduction," a discourse is "an identity kit with a costume on how to act and talk by taking a certain role people will recognize" (7). It likes creating a character for yourself that represents you and what you are doing. For example, most people who work in retail in restaurant services have a discourse that caters to your customers. Though these discourses are part of our identity, sometimes we get thrown into situations where we have adapt to a discourse that we are not fully grown into but have to act like we've mastered it. This would be called learning how to mushfake.

I would say there have two real instances where I had to do this and take on discourses that I was not fully comfortable with. The first instance would be around my family. I have discourse that is part of my identity with my immediate family members. But my extended family expands way farther than what I could keep up with. With that being said, I would say I am not really close with a majority of them. However, they always ask the same typical questions when I see them "like how is school going" or "what are you planning to do after you graduate." This is coming from a family that expects engineers and doctors or going into the military if you did not go to school. For me to feel like family to accept I did not have necessarily lie, but definitely had to fake it. I told them how I was planning to go into education, but I would speak very highly of my process and what my goals as a teacher was once I finished the credential program. I would even bring up random facts about the education system to seem like I knew what I was getting into. But to be honest, I didn't and I still don't. I have a little bit of experience in classrooms and it still has not fully convinced me that I am going down the right path. But I could not let my family, who i would see maybe once or twice a year, know that. All they wanted to hear was success stories and bright futures. So I had to give them what they wanted.

The second instance would be at my first job I had while I was still in high school. Right by my house there was this cool new laser tag place just opening up and was having a job fair and I thought "what cooler way to make money than working at a laser tag arena!" Getting through the interview process was the easy part because all I had to was be myself. Being on the job was the hard part. The job required knowledge on computers and programs that were completely brand new to me. The entire time, I kept thinking about what happens if something breaks down or does not work, I did not know how to fix it! Unfortunately, things eventually did start breaking down on me and I still really did not know how to fix it even though it was part of my job. It took a lot of guessing and trial and error to get things back up and running, but things eventually would start working again. I wish I could tell you how exactly I got things fixed, but to this day, I still don't know how I did not burn the place down trying to do something I did not actually know how to do. I just faked it till I made it. To be fair, a lot of people of that job were faking it. That might be why it closed down last year.