Erin Roberson

English 111
Community Synthesis Essay
28 September 2015
Problems in Joining Communities
When I first hear the word community, I automatically think of my small hometown of
Shepherd. It is the type of town where everyone seems to know everyone and everything that is
going on. Parents and students come to all the football and basketball games. There are
fundraisers for athletics and club trips. Shepherd is a community in itself brought together by
location, with many smaller subgroups within it. Citizens of the town and students of the school
who regularly visit or who live here belong to this community. They take part in many of the
activities put on such as the Maple Syrup Festival by volunteering throughout the weekend
festivities. Many of the people in the town have similar interests when it comes to the health of
our people, the education, and wanting to see everybody do well. Abiding by the rules and laws
of the town is a requirement for being accepted into and staying the community. However, teens
at the school who do drugs are looked down upon and deemed more as outcasts because they do
not follow the laws of the community. They are not quite accepted, as many completely outside
of the community are not accepted. Joining a community is a challenge that everyone faces at
some point in their lives, either by moving to a new place and joining a new community like
Shepherd or joining small groups like a club or even groups of friends.
The community of Shepherd is made of many subgroups such as art community, science,
football, basketball, drama, band, student and parent communities. These subgroups are brought
together by shared interests and similar characteristics that mold them into smaller more specific

types of communities. One community that has a strong influence here is the running
community. In the running community, everyone is working toward a common goal: To become
a better runner. By running more miles, dropping their times or ranking higher in a race,
becoming better is a shared goal. Many interests specifically about running are talked about and
shared in this community, which requires they have a shared vocabulary. Topics such as college
track and cross country are popular among coaches and high school runners. Gerald Graff
discusses discourse communities in his article Hidden Intellectualism and how he had to
change the way he talked to fit in. Graff explains If you were less than negligible as a fighter,
as I was, you settled for the next best thing which was to be inarticulate, carefully hiding telltale
marks of literacy like correct grammar and pronunciation (266). Although for Graff fitting in
was more difficult, it is easier in the running. Even if you are not the best runner, as long as you
act and talk the way a runner does, for example using terms that refer specifically to running, you
fit into the community.
It recognizes that everybody works toward a common goal that they have set for
themselves as an individual, for example a runner wanting to drop 10 seconds off of their mile
time, but also the common goals of the community as a whole, for example a cross country
teams goal to win states. Tom Hanks wrote about his experience in community college and how
even though the people themselves were so different, the one thing that connected them was the
school. It was a common goal of trying to get a higher education and pass their classes that
brought Hanks a sense of community with his other classmates. In his instance, it was easy to
join a community of because of a shared goal. These common goals bring together individuals
into a group with shared interests, qualities, goals and even shared experiences that create a
community of many.

This last spring there was a fire downtown that completely destroyed three buildings. I
remember getting done with track practice and coming outside of the school to wait for my older
sister to pick me up and just seeing this giant, dark cloud in the sky in the direction of downtown
quickly coming toward the school and filling the sky. The air smelled bitter and unpleasant. At
that time I got a text that said the basket weaving store was on fire. When my sister arrived I had
her drive past the store to see if we could get a look. The smoke was thick even a few blocks
down where the police had blocked off the road and directing people away from the danger. We
could see many firefighters and police officers there trying to fight this massive fire that was
spreading to two other stores. The whole street was filled with people watching them work. Later
that night, I read many stories of how the local store owners had brought food and clean drinking
water for the brave men. There was a sudden feeling of closeness in school the next day, the
people grim.
Outside was another story. Strangers to our community talked about the fire in an offhand
way, like one might talk about a disaster in faraway country. Tragic, but what can you do. It did
not affect them as much because they did not live there. They did not see the weaving store, print
store, and the laundromat every day like the rest of us did. It is similar to how outsiders to the
unique Roseto community described by Malcolm Gladwell would react. Since they were not
involved directly in the community, it did not directly affect them and they would have more
difficulty joining the community because of the lack of connection.
Months after the fire all that remains is an empty cleaned up plot and a big, dingy wall
that faces the main road. The worry of that has since faded and the town is back into its normal
routine. The city council has contacted the art department at the school and currently classes are
developing designs for a mural that represent Shepherd and are preparing to present final ideas to

the council soon. The mural will be going where once a fire raged, bringing together students and
representing the community of Shepherd. In many of the the designs I have noticed that students
have put things that represent Shepherd as a whole, and things that are easily recognizable about
it, such as the water tower, railroad track and Mitchells.
It made me realize that only students from Shepherd or those who have spent a great deal
of time there would be able to do a project such as this. The students had to be familiar with the
area and know history of the town and people otherwise they were noted as outsiders, such a new
student, who will be referred to as John, who recently transferred and did not know the layout of
town as well. It may be more difficult for him to join this community because he is in a new
town he is unfamiliar with, these are new people who may have already set prejudices against
him, and he has to learn new culture and customs.
Brent Staples is a writer for the New York Times who has written about his experiences
with set prejudices against him because of the color of his skin and how he fit into neither the
community that people viewed him nor the community that he wanted to be in because of these
prejudices. In his struggle to join and fit into a more intellectual, less threatening community, he
went so far as to whistle melodies from Beethoven and Vivaldi and the more popular classical
composer. It took him many years to learn to fit in, unlike John who may take only a few weeks
because John had fewer prejudices set against him and it made joining the community easier.