My first class at Hamilton was “American Academic Essay,” an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) course held twice a week in KJ 250, which is supposed to help students ease their way into writing in college.
As Hamilton students, it comes as no surprise to any of us that this College does not take writing skills lightly, and students have to make sure to develop a different skill set than what was required in high school. This class ended up being so much more than just a writing-intensive class that resulted in me learning every single type of essay. Moved to KJ 222 last January from Buttrick Hall (where it was located for 12 years), the ESOL program came to be one of my biggest support systems on campus.
Any student who has used the resources offered by the program, including individual tutoring, knows that it deserves more attention than it receives. I have met several international and non-native-speaking upperclassmen who had not heard of this program before I spoke to them, which is incredibly disheartening. Why is this the case?
If we want to live up to our reputation and make sure that everyone at Hamilton feels like they belong here, we have got to give credit to the resources and programs that work day and night to accomplish this goal and promote them sufficiently. This is not a program alienating a certain group of people from the rest of campus: it achieves quite the opposite.
The ESOL classes and tutorials are the best accessible resources for realizing the value of inclusivity.
We have to make sure that faculty encourage students to take advantage of this program as it is designed for the multilingual population on this campus and for anyone who wants to improve their academic writing skills.
As the Hamilton community continues to come together, we should work to take down the wall of linguistic profiling and remember the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.”
‘From Where I Sit’ is a column dedicated to international students’ voices. If you are interested in contributing a piece, contact Britt Hysell at [email protected].
