There is no way that a person could be someone in this world without education. We all know this. Although, not everyone has access to the same opportunities when it comes to progressing with education. You see… you are judged by how smart you are and people determine your intelligence by the amount of schooling you’ve had in life. For some odd reason, good jobs always require a bachelor’s, master’s, or even a Ph.D. That should not be the case because a degree does not automatically make you smart. Society has a bad habit of stereotyping not having a degree to not having intelligence. A prime example of education not being linked to schooling is Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of an ivy league school in 2005 to expand his small project that is now a trillion dollar company. This is just one of a million cases of dropouts making their way up to the top. There are also some things that hold people back from getting an education from school. It’s their language. It’s extremely hard for people to live in America and not be able to speak good English. I’ve seen it in my mom’s case. She was born in Ecuador and speaks English in a very broken manner. She gets treated differently from someone who could speak English fluently and it’s very upsetting because that’s not how it should work. She’s been denied jobs, not taken seriously, ignored, the list goes on and on. People think she doesn’t have intelligence but she does, she just doesn’t have the platform to explain it. Someone’s intelligence should not be determined by how easily another person could understand them.
Shyness in education
Education has always shown this hierarchy of power, where if you weren’t good or smart enough you didn’t have a certain level of intelligence. It depends on how many degrees and what those degrees are, for you to have any sort of respect and education in the world or life in general. When somebody is in an intellectual sort of debate they list the amount of degrees they have and what schools they’ve attended to classify their intelligence. I’m a very shy person, if I were to have many degrees I wouldn’t be the type to show them off because I don’t believe that throwing my degrees in somebody’s face is a sign of intelligence. When people in middle school or high school would brag about the grades they get on tests I would never join into those conversations because my grades were always either below or average and if you didn’t have a certain grade on your test you weren’t considered smart in any way. There are different ways someone could be smart, it’s not only book smart to show intelligence. I learned English from my family. We speak in the same way in terms of accent but not in terms of how we use the language. Growing up the people around you influence the way you talk or act. but as I was growing up I didn’t say what they said or how they would say them. Although English is my first and only language, I’m really bad at forming sentences in essays or just in regular conversation. I’ve always been shy so that really affects the way I speak to people and the amount of words I use in conversation, so instead of saying a full sentence I give half sentences or small phrases. In doing those things and not having the strongest writing skills I don’t believe that shows how intelligent I am or could be.
Speaking Spanish in English
Education: (1.) the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university, (2.) an enlightening experience. Although my first language was Spanish, English is now the language I am most fluent in and speak the most. Growing up surrounded by immigrant parents and my mom’s non native English speaking friends, my English was spoken in a slight accent and in broken phrases. Though school has always been my main source of English, the conversations I’ve had with my mom had of equal significance to the writings in class. Raised in a house where thick accents and half English half Spanish phrases were extremely prevalent, English sounded like a symphony that came in different notes. English was a song that could be played differently depending on composer. Learning English in two drastic different environments has made it feel like I can speak two different languages. Being able to comprehend both a professor’s lecture and a thick accent is a skill I often overlook. English has always been my favorite subject, being able to change the way I’m perceived simply by my vocabulary. While I look back and think my experience learning English has been mostly positive I also can acknowledge that it wasn’t as great in the beginning. Being “threatened” to be put into the ESL program as if it was a punishment. Ironic considering I was out in a dual language program the following year. I was made hyperaware at a young age that my mother’s English was imperfect and should be constantly corrected. Yet while not perfect it was one of my sources of English for many years and helped create the perfect environment for my ever evolving knowledge.
