"like wearing shoes that don't fit..."

8 April 2025: One cool experience this semester has been working with English 102 students who are athletes and seeing them write about their sport in language that reveals their deep knowledge of it. I love seeing them slide into a discourse they know so well. 

Today I was working with a soccer play on her essay on the use of VAR. She is opposed to it, for reasons that are not exactly logical, but still quite compelling, philosophical, and just interesting. At one point, she used a "fancy" word ("elucidate") and it kind of delighted me, so I commented on it. I think she thought I was teasing her or calling her out on it. "Sometimes when I use a word like that," she said, "I feel weird about it...like I'm wearing shoes that don't fit." I insisted that I understood, but she used it right and shouldn't feel weird.

The cool analogy she used--"like wearing shoes that don't fit"--has been on my mind on and off all day. I eventually realized that for a soccer player, that similie carries some extra weight.