Me Talk Pretty One Day Summary

In David Sedaris article “Me Talk Pretty One Day” he colorfully describes his encounter as a forty-one year old returning to school. Specifically, he describes his encounter in his French class, while including some examples about his classmates, he describes his experiences and progress made in understanding the language. This sadistic teacher, as he describes her, provides a very tough learning environment in which he and many of his classmates struggle in. The author insinuates in the end of his article that even though the this class was hard beyond belief and students were clearly being verbally abused by a teacher; his compression of the language and its beauty increased, which seems to make the abuse worth it. In this article we can see how his experiences both shaped and threaten the author’s identity.
This author does many things well in his description of this French class these include: use of detailed descriptions, real life examples, and purposeful misspellings of the teacher’s dialogue. All of these literary devices help to enhance the author's work and provide an almost surreal tone to the author’s work. A weakness of this article is that the purpose of these techniques does not truly present itself until the

While explaining the amount of work he put in to his various homework assignments, he states, that he attempted to establish and identity in his work that the teacher did not approve of his identity. The teachers’, for lack of a better phrase, verbal abuse bares down on the students in her class as she publicly humiliates them. The tone of theses dialogues and descriptive techniques used to enhance his real experiences, clearly demonstrate how the author felt during this time. He also mentions that this abuse also occurred outside of the classroom. Which as one could expect, made this experience all the more