Horton 1

Jacob Horton
Professor C. Blandford
UWRT 1101-028
September 8, 2015
WTE 1
In Go Carolina, David Sedaris tells the reader about the troubles he went through as a young
child with his speech problems. What Sedaris is attempting to make the reader understand about
himself is not that he has a speech impediment, but that he is a child that wants to be popular and
accepted by other children. Sedaris explains that he was looked at differently by his teachers and
his colleagues because of his speech impediment. He talks about his speech classes that he has to
take during school. He explains that he did not want others to know about him having to take the
classes but his teachers always made it obvious to his classmates that he had to go to the speech
class. Sedaris says that his teacher would announce to the class each day that he had to go to his
speech class at 2:30. He sarcastically says that the teacher probably announced that he would
have had to go even when he was absent for the day, showing the reader how often the teacher
talked about his speech class. Sedaris goes on to talk about the embarrassment that this brought
him. Sedaris tells the reader about how much he disliked his speech class. He says that you never
saw any popular kids that had to attend the speech classes. He says that he felt as that there must
have been some correlation between the speech classes and being popular. Sedaris also talks
about how his speech teacher, or as Sedaris referred to her, Agent Samson, referred to his speech
impediment as being a lazy tongue. Sedaris says that Agent Samson talked about hanging a
sign on the door of the speech therapy room. He says She was probably thinking along the lines
of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have read FUTURE

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HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA. This quote really demonstrates how embarrassed Sedaris
was about having to take the speech impediment therapy classes. It also shows that how Sedaris
truly thought about himself due to the comments and attitude of his peers and his teachers. It is
hard as a young child to make friends and being a young boy that was in speech classes with a
severe lisp probably made it even harder. He also talks about how embarrassed his therapy
teacher made him feel when Agent Samson would make him do things such as read little
childrens stories that had a lot of ss or say her name or listen to himself try to talk. He also talks
about learning new words and even having his mother buy him a thesaurus in order to try to
avoid saying words in which his lisp would show, demonstrating that Sedaris was doing all that
he could to try to seem normal among his colleagues. Sedaris also talks about the fact that he did
not much care for sports. He explains this when he first met Agent Samson. She asked Sedaris
who he preferred in the major rivalry between Carolina and State. He uses this rivalry to
illustrate that children, especially boys, who were not much into sports were not very often not
socially accepted or popular. Sedaris shows this in Go Carolina at the beginning when he says I
had no interest in football or basketball but had learned that it was best to pretend otherwise.
This shows that although he did not care about sports as a young child, he often pretended that he
did so he would be more socially accepted. .Sedaris explaining how he would pretend to be
interested in sports when asked really demonstrates how badly Sedaris wanted to be accepted. It
is no good that a young boy like that had to pretend to be interested in things that he was not in
order to make friends. All of these things show that the speech impediment is not what Sedaris
wanted the reader to understand about him. Sedaris tries to show the reader that he wanted
friends and to be considered popular among the other children.