I was born in a country located in Central America, where the official native language is Spanish. Like many immigrants, the time came when I had to start learning English as my second language. I learned my first words in English in school by reading children’s books which helped me improve my language skills, however, there came a time when I realized that I still had a hard time speaking and understanding conversations in English. My family could not help me although they tried to support me by teaching me the little that they knew. I mostly had to figure things out on my own. Learning English has been a difficult task for me that sometimes I feel dumb because I know people that learned English in a couple of years. Every time that I want to make a conversation in English I feel like a different person. I get nervous which makes me mess up the words and my brain stops working. Also when speaking English I often think that people would make fun of me which makes me feel insecure. To improve my English, I am trying to have the same confidence as when I speak Spanish because I believe that it can help me to better express myself and I would be able to talk to other people which can help build my English skills. Writing English also has been difficult to learn because many of the words sound the same for example tree and three or bird, bear, beer, and beard to me all of those words sound the same which makes me struggle a bit but I had amazing friends that had helped me with my writing skills they often the right way to spell words or correct my grammar. Learning English has been a challenge but I am feeling confident that one day I will be able to build and speak full conversation and confidence just like “my Spanish self”.
Education with Low Attention Span
The life of an average student goes as follows, in my eyes: Wake up, get ready, go to school (online of offline), thoroughly follow all regulations of every class, go home, do whatever work is left, study, and take what is left in the day for yourself. The factors and layouts of your day can alternate for this pattern, but it usually follows the schedule of comprehending everything, or at least mostly, of what is going on in class. However, for students like me, patterns can shift greatly due to my attention span being minute (small, not scaling time). Due to this, I see a lot of learning experiences differently, as if it doesn’t heavily intrigue me, I will basically blurt almost everything out and be left at the end of the class or classes completely stranded. And to top that off with my short term memory, I guess I would be just like Dory. During my high school years has been incredibly tough, to say the least, as I’m sure you, the rest of my classmates in your first semester of college, were aware that teachers in that grade range don’t care as much as you need them to, so me not caring about the topic and you just working in a minimalistic sense to just get paid doesn’t bode well for me over time. To be more specific, I remember my entire freshman year was a mixture of me trying to make a name for myself by acting out along with putting maximum effort into learning some of the curriculum. It was, to put it frankly, a nightmare having myself force a social life while acting like I cared about school, and it further lessened my taste for education. Not to mention, the topics being taught weren’t adding on to help it either. However, more into English, that’s probably the only class that I’ve always flourished in. The topics were straightforward and allowed me to be creative and adaptive to the takes I presented. In grade 11, I had a teacher who kept reminding the class that “no answer is wrong as long as you have the means to back it up.” Now I know it seems like something so obvious, but it truly did stick with me anytime I do any form of work. English is the best class to symbolize that phrase as, even me who loses focus after even the smallest sign of boredom, I can’t get bored with writing what I feel about something, as we usually write about what intrigues us anyways. Similar to the stories which spoke about this, writing is just a resemblance of personal character, which is portrayed by how you structure your work.
Misleading Education
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.
