Korman: Time to ‘like,’ muster up some confidence in the classroom

Life is tough for smart kids.

As children, they might be labeled “nerds” or “geeks”… Life is tough for smart kids.

As children, they might be labeled “nerds” or “geeks” or have their faces stuffed into toilet bowls.

In high school, their acumen might leave little time for socialization or put off members of the opposite sex.

It could also earn them a scholarship to college — where conditions are more favorable to smart kids than, say, elementary school. In the early years, the smartest kid in class is often the least socially accepted and the most harassed for his boogers.

This ingrained aversion to smartness, in one form or another, is still present in the college classroom. Thus, students must arrive at a compromise between smartness and coolness.

Grades in most seminar-style classes weigh class participation heavily, so contributing insightful analysis to class discussions is less taboo.

Sure, your classmates might think you’re a nerd, but you’re here to impress the professor, get a good grade, get into your top choice grad school and so on.

Perhaps if your comments are astute enough, your professor might even write your recommendation letter with your thoughtful commentary firmly in mind.

Despite all this, the fear of regularly sounding smart manifests itself in college classrooms in the form of five words: “I was just gonna say.”

This utterance is by far the most frequent way students qualify their statements during class discussions.

It’s a verbal tick, like appending “y’know” or “right?” to sentences one expects to be contentious.

Pitt communication professor John Lyne, who specializes in rhetoric in argumentation, translates the phrase as, “I think I have something of interest to say — but don’t get your hopes up.

“We would all like to have some rhetorical control over how our comments are understood, and conversational qualifiers are modest attempts to do that,” Lyne said. “When someone speaks up in class, I think they realize that they run the risk that their comments will be taken as obvious or irrelevant.”

Professor Mickey Bannon, also of the communication department, suspects the phrase is an involuntary focusing mechanism and that it’s giving “like” and “y’know” a run for their money.

“The most common situation involves a lot of students wanting to comment at the same time, so teachers have to call on them to keep the discussion organized,” Bannon said. “They were listening to someone else talk, and now they need that second or two to reactivate their own thoughts. But they’re afraid to let the silence work because they might think that, since they were asking to be called on, they ought to have something to say.”

Bannon estimates that four out of five students who aren’t the first to be called on in a given discussion will preface their comments with “I was just gonna say.”

The phrase illustrates our dualism as collegiate organisms. In the classroom, our words and actions are evaluated by two distinct audiences: our peers and our professors.

The phrase thus serves as a means for us to let our teachers know that we are smart but also let our classmates know that we’re not that smart — we just kinda say things in class because, you know, class participation’s part of the grade, and we don’t wanna fail or nothin’.

Of course, this could be accomplished through more candid phrases than, “I was just gonna say.”

Take a hypothetical discussion in an economics class, for example: “Capitalism isn’t perfect, but it’s the best economic system mankind has developed to date. I am a fun person and will consume many alcoholic beverages this weekend.”

Lyne points out that “I was just gonna say,” while pervasive, is not the only conversational qualifier that college students regularly employ. He is quick to note expressions like “I’m just saying” and “like” — the latter of which he calls the “reigning qualifier of our time.”

“To some extent, [‘like’] is just a habit, but I think it also reflects a lack of confidence that one can muster words adequate to the situation — and that we can only take a stab at what it’s ‘like.’ As I recently overhead on the bus, ‘Descartes was, like, wondering if he existed, and I’m like, OK dude,’” Lyne said.

In fairness to the offender, I had to read a lot of Descartes for a class once, and it’s not the most explicable material. I’m not advocating the use of qualifiers to describe difficult concepts. I was just gonna say, y’know, the dude, like, has a point.

E-mail Ben at bek25@pitt.edu.