The first week the fact that I was in a completely different realm hit home when I received the following handout:

The Rainbow of Confusion

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After some time to adjust I have found that I enjoy the challenges that this “Ivory Tower” brings with it. But at first there was culture shock.

To be frank, out of the dozen or so professors I have heard speak, a few of them spout out loads of rubbish, or (in American), they are full of bullshit.

But the professors are aware of it. In the first week, we heard the following in a lecture:

“Now when you are using a questionnaire or a survey to get data from students, you need be careful. Sometimes you get invalid results when you have subjects who are cognitively or linguistically challenged…[there is a pause, and then Prof X starts to laugh at herself]…I mean, students who can’t read very well!”

And then Professor Y opened the course on Multilingual and Multicultural Education with a lecture full of crazy new words…”degustation”, “bilinguality”, “equilingualism”, “plurilingualism”, “triskadekalingualism”, etc. (Okay one of those I made up.) But then he recognized how verbose he was being and ironically described it using more of the same sorts of language:

“I don’t speak this way at home to my wife. I am adopting an academic register, using vocabulary that I don’t use outside of this linguistic domain, this context.”

But it can be sort of infectious. At the end of the first week, when I was explaining my research proposal to my classmates, there was the following exchange.

Me: “…so one reason I am concerned about that approach to collecting the data is that it might not be very efficacious.”

Sitting to my right, SC shakes his head, “Huh?”

“It wouldn’t work.”

Does this look as nerdy to you as it does to me? Academia. Sigh. But coming up: the bright side of it.