Essay Sample on Struggling in College English

An icon is a person or object that unites people around a common interest, circumstance, sentiment, or experience. Famous individuals, buildings, movies, a shared worry, or a physical handicap are all examples of icons. An icon does not need to be widely recognized; it only has to be relevant to the specific group to which you belong, such as race, language, religion, a shared experience among your generation, the region of the globe in which you reside, and so on. An icon is well-known for either improving or deteriorating the way your organization functions. Icons don't have to be people or religious rituals; they may be everyday events. An icon does not have to be a person or a religious prosperity; it may also be an experience that is shared by a large group of people, whether it be a positive or negative one. Everyone has taken English at some point, whether it was required by the federal government or your parents got cuffed, required by the college you're attending, or for some weird reason intentionally taken. It’s not uncommon to struggle in college English after High School. It's a widely shared negative experience amongst many college students, because of the adjustment to a new environment, bigger workload, little one on one time with the instructor, and very broad instructions on the criteria of an assignment or an essay.

The environment of college English is drastically different than when you're studying English in High School. Unlike high school, when your identity and reputation have been the same for a long time, college requires you to reinvent yourself. You may be in bigger classrooms for the first several years, but as courses grow more specialized, they will become smaller. College English allows a student to span their friend group from different: regions, nationalities, interests, and age groups, and not be in classroom where everyone acts and looks alike.

The amount of homework in English varies immensely from High School going into college, which is a negative experience that students have to get used to. 

Students accumulate to having less than one hour of homework (with all of their classes included) a night with parents and teachers getting on their case about completing it, and adjust to having an average of nine hours of homework for just English class. The length of essays is something that students have to acclimate to in high school essays are often prepared with a broad readership in mind. High School essays are normally written in such a way that virtually anybody can read and comprehend the essay and its topic; five paragraphs is usually the minimum necessary for High School essays in order to get the message across. College essays, on the other hand, are composed for the professor and must be at least three pages long, conveying the major ideas and topics with succinct phrasing and clarity.Not only is the workload immensely smaller in High School English than in college English, the teachers usually go over most of the problems in class, teachers also give students the chance to work on their essays in class, spoon feeding what to do for the essay into the students head. Students have to get used to professors, giving them very vague help, little to no time to work on essays or assignments in class (due to hour-long lectures), and actually thinking about ideas for the essay: prompts, key components, main idea, thesis, conclusion, and so on. So to go from having a small amount of English homework that was mostly worked on in class and was mostly programmed into our brain, from having a lot of English homework that has very vague instructions and spans your creative thinking is a heroin struggle for a lot of students.

In High School Students are used to going over instructions for an essay in very precise detail, the teacher tells them how to do it, when to do it, what to write about, and what format it will be put in, much like the military, they are taught how to stuff, and to ask questions. After they graduate they go from this robotic like programming that their High School teachers ingrained in their brain, to having professors explaining the bare minimum about what the essay is going to be about. High School English teachers often announce when an essay or an assignment is going to be due and go in depth about what the assignment is going to be about and the criteria for the assignment. College professors usually handout a syllabus with the assignment, essays, and due dates, but while it’s expected that the essay be turned into MLA format, the syllabus does little to cover all of the other criteria.

Struggling in college English goes from your parents being held accountable for your academic progress to the student being held accountable. Nobody is willing to hold a student accountable for their studies or how much time or effort they put into their studies, unless their parents paid for the tuition, then they will probably hold their kid accountable. Being held accountable is something that is very common in High School, your parents and your teachers are constantly on you about your grades and your classes are held every Monday through Friday. Students are usually held at a pretty high standard when it comes to college, having to at least get a B average while trying to balance part-time jobs, and extracurricular activities. Students don’t question it though because those are the basic requirements to get into a good college, but that is a basic guideline that is easy for students to follow, which is another example of how English is ingrained in a students head in High School.. In college classes are usually held once every other day, Monday through Friday and it’s nobody's job to hold the student accountable. In order to succeed  Another reason that is common to have difficulties in college is due to the fact that it is required by law to attend High School “sometimes referred to as the Becca Bill, requires that school districts file truancy petitions with the Juvenile Court when students have accumulated seven unexcused absences in one month or not later than fifteen unexcused absences in an academic year” (King County, Truancy 2022). Until the student turns sixteen the law will come after their parents if they don’t attend school. There is no law that will come after a college student's parents if the student has too many absences on their record. College students themselves will be held reliable,“federal regulations require colleges and universities to deny financial aid assistance to those students who do not demonstrate satisfactory academic progress by maintaining a minimum of a 2.0 GPA. [Student] will not be able reinstate financial aid without meeting GPA requirements” (Hughes, 2022). So, if a student doesn’t have a backup plan for funding, the student won’t be able to continue their studies, because the federal government won’t pay for it. Students have to go from the military like instructions of having someone consistently tell them what to do, to having to hold themselves accountable so they don’t get penalized.

In conclusion, college English is a struggle for students, because it allows you to broaden your creativity and step outside of your comfort zone. High School English is instruction based, with assignments drilled into students, rather than allowing  the student to think for themselves. College English, actually makes it so accumulates students, to holding themselves accountable, thinking freely and broadening their horizons, getting them used to unfamiliar environments, and getting them out of the state of listening to instructions without questioning them, and getting used to the free thinking adult world.