Other Others

At the University, in our literature courses, in our theory course, the idea of the misunderstood Other usually makes a few appearance and usually decides to hang around for the duration of the eighteen week course. A few students identify, a few students re-define and a few Others remain quiet and re-read the texts in order to understand something “else.”
We discussed the term “Other” in class the other day, and I once again pondered the significance. Every semester that I have heard and discussed this term it has been in reference to something different: race, women, caste. But this semester, being in a classroom chock full of teaching assistants, I feel that this semester the Other has significance in the English 100 and 110 classroom. We read Comp tales forever ago (or was it just two weeks?), and I thought about it then. Those undergraduate students who are taught. Those undergraduate student who are finding their place in their first semester writing class in college. They are the Others this year. They have the trivial place of being the unknown and sometimes misunderstood role of being “rubbish” writers.
Of course, I am at the disadvantage of not teaching them. I really have nothing to do with them. I merely hear the stories from TA’s. But in the classroom, in front of the graduate student, in front of the Associate Professor, in front of the tenured Professor, how can that student not feel at a disadvantage. How can that student not feel as if whatever voice s/he had before is now gone, lost to an academic version of laryngitis?
This will be the first year of learning to write academically. This will be the first year of stifling personal “voice” in order to fulfill that requirement. I have heard some teachers voice bemusement at confused and muddled essays wherein the requirements were not met, or the writing was dry and boring, or there was no essay at all.
I just remember thinking in my undergrad, “Okay, the first essay is the hardest, because you don’t really know what the Professor wants. My Mind or repeat after me.”