Year: 2019

2006. Kindergarten.

            We were told to write a story, there was a number of lines we were required to fill. I remember we had our blue folders up, it was a test and there was a time limit. 

             Palms sweaty, cramps in my left hand, I was in a rush. I had to finish on time. I could hear everyone’s pencils scribbling on the paper, they had so much to say, I remember thinking. I knew what I wanted to say but, under all the pressure it didn’t translate well on paper. “And then aun scwad eradiue vatxjia gudia maan iujxn euo…” is what I started to write in order to fill the lines. 

             Pencils dropping, papers rusting, chairs sliding back, everyone began to hand in their assignments. 

             As I got up, a part of me thought, “the teacher will understand what I’m trying to say”, but when she looked at my paper, she was so confused. I quickly went back to my seat, I couldn’t wait to go home and draw. 

 

             Beginning.

             I grew up speaking roughly 4 languages and I was terrible at all of them. I remember my brain being so confused all the time. “Speak Urdu with your mom” my dad would say. Meanwhile, he spoke to me in Punjabi. We’d watch movies in Hindi and my siblings and I conversed in English. 

             English. What a language.

             As I grew up, I slowly mastered these languages but it sure was a rollercoaster learning them. In elementary school I was placed in ESL, my dad was so disappointed, he’d always say to me “you was born here, how could you not know the english”. My spirit was constantly crushed, I would get so frustrated when it came to reading and writing. Instead of reading I’d look at the illustrations and sometimes I would copy them. I’d draw them over and over again until one of the teachers would scream my name incorrectly. 

 

             Reading tests. 

             We had books. We read them. When it came to reading tests, we would read a passage aloud to the teacher. As we read the words, she’d put a check mark next to them with her green marker indicating that, yes, we did in fact read these words out loud successfully. Some kids would move on to the “next level”. I would always stay at the same level. 

             It wasn’t that I didn’t like reading, there had been only one way of teaching and I couldn’t comprehend the lessons. I found them boring. Stupid. Useless.

             I wanted help, but I didn’t know how to ask or what to say. I wanted to do better but I was stuck. I wanted to write about how I was feeling but, I didn’t have the vocabulary. I wanted to make my dad proud but I didn’t know where to begin. 

 

             English, Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi.

             Looking back has made me realize how difficult it was, finding a balance between these languages. There wasn’t exactly a “how to” guide on speaking four languages. Even now, I struggle with my third and fourth languages, but these experiences make me who I am today. Even though I struggle, I know it’s worth it. 

        As a child I was terrible at both reading and writing. I remember being in my home country in Georgetown, Guyana, in the 2nd grade not being able to take in any information my teachers taught me. My brain wasn’t registering what my ears were hearing. Like Malcolm X, I couldn’t write my words on the line, nor did I know any words to write on said lines. One thing I hated about my school and my teachers was if you got something wrong or didn’t understand something, you would get hit with a ruler as a punishment. There was a day in my school where I got terrified because one of my classmates was trying to get on the teachers good side and brought her a bamboo stick to punish us with if we got in trouble. I was scared because that day we had a test that day and if we ever fail a test we would get beaten, and a bamboo stick hurts more than a ruler and leaves a mark on your skin. Thankfully nothing happened because my classmates persuaded the student to throw the bamboo stick outside the window. Later on that year I learned that my family was moving to America and I was excited because my dad told me it snowed there and I’d never seen snow. Also, I was happy the teachers didn’t hit their students. Little did I know that my experiences in school in America would be worse than my experience in my country.

 

        I was 8 years old when I came to the U.S. with my mom and my sister. We moved to Brooklyn first to live with my Aunt and that’s where I started my first school year in America. I had been placed in the 3rd grade and I was far behind my classmates when it came to any of the subjects, my worst class was English. In my country we speak an English based creole with African American and East Indian syntax, so it was hard for my teachers and classmates to understand me, it was also hard for me to understand them. My country’s educational system wasn’t as good as Americas, so I wasn’t prepared to see how much harder English was in America than in my country. I was failing all my classes with 50’s and 60’s and what made it worse was that, that same year we moved to Florida where I would have to start over again meeting new people and learning English a different way because teachers don’t teach the same. I was happy though because we moved in with my Aunt and she’s a teacher so she would help me with my homework. She would always bring home practice problems that she gave her class for me to do, I would have to read a passage and answer questions which she would check and help me find the right answers which resulted in me becoming better at reading and writing. finally my brain was processing the information my ears were hearing. As a child I loved reading books and my favorite books to read was “Dragon Slayers Academy” by Kate Mcmullan and “Charlotte’s Webs” by E.B. White. At first it was difficult reading these books, but as I kept on reading I was beginning to understand what was going on in the story and create a clear picture in my head. This helped me improve my reading and my writing, as well as my English which enabled me to talk to my teachers when I needed help and also make new friends.

 

        Without my books, without my Aunt, and without coming to America, I would still not have been able to write on the line, which to me is just sad. Also, I wouldn’t understand what it was that I was reading. Without any type of reading, people wouldn’t be able to access any information that we receive from reading books, expand their word bank, and they wouldn’t be able to challenge their minds and become smarter, more knowledgeable. Without reading we would revert back to the caveman period and we wouldn’t be able to communicate without grunting. I say this because reading helps you to learn words, languages and you can use that to interact with others and build connections. Reading is one of the most essential skills to have and it has endless possibilities of how to use it.

At this point in my life I find myself in an interesting predicament regarding my attitudes toward reading and writing. For anything that I wanna become In life reading is a major part of it. Everything involves reading. I just want to thank my past teachers and parents cause without them I think I would have the passion to read or write anything. When talking about reading and writing, I think about elementary school to now. Throughout my years in school I was lucky to meet teachers who had live to read and help me with this subject. Reading and writing wasn’t really my favorite subject. I wasn’t bad at it, I just didn’t like to read. My parents and my pass teachers helped me progress. They helped me understand passages even though they would be boring at times. My mom or dad would have me pick from a news paper if it was from the sports section or cartoons and have me summarize it. They would also choose 10 words from the dictionary and have me write each word 5 time each, know how to spell them, define it , and know how to use it in a sentence. So as I said, I didn’t like to read often. If I even see a big paragraph I would just skim through it. I wouldn’t read it clearly.

My middle school teacher ms Craig also had a big impact on me. She would have a way for me to read boring texts. She also thought me to express myself in my writings. If we were writing on a topic in class she told us to brain storm and jot down notes that relates to the topic for 10 to 15 minutes. After she would tell us to write introduction, body number 1, body number 2, counter claim and conclusion on our papers. From there we would use the ideas we brain storm about the topic and put it in those categories to organize our thoughts. This strategy actually had helped me become a better writer because not it helped me become a better and improved writer.

Before I learned this strategy I had a bad experience. One of my experience was when I had to write an essay and present on a topic based on martin Luther king. So back then I would just write non stop and not even look back to see what I was writing. So when I was writing on Martin Luther king jr, I was just trying to finish fast. So my time had came up in my class to present. As I was reading I had notice that I wrote all over the place. It wasn’t organized right. I had written some topics on Martin Luther king over and over. I was basically repeating myself . So I was embarrassed. So at the end of my presentation out of 1-4 I had gotten a 2.5 which kind of bad. I did t get that high grade because of me not organizing my writing.

A literacy narrative is a popular way for writers to talk about their relationship with reading, speaking, and writing. It is basically free writing that makes your brain get loose. You are supposed to write non stop until you can’t write no more on a topic. From there you organize your writing from what you have wrote . I can honestly say that if anybody is writing about any topic they should recommend this strategy. It is helpful in my opinion. It helps you develop your reading/writing skills for your upcoming future

When I was younger I felt real low about myself in school. I never really thought of myself as a reader or writer. The teacher would try to facilitate discussions and I just couldn’t comprehend what the other kids were saying. Throughout middle school and most of high school I hated reading and I hated writing. Why is that? We had to read certain books that was a part of the “curriculum” the school had, everyone knows that. It was like I had to read a book and understand all the metaphors and the ideas of what the author wanted us to know. Listening to all the kids talking and going into depth of a book that meant nothing to me was kind of the start of me hating to read or write. 

   After that came essays we all had to write every single time and there was always a specific thing we had to write about and find details to support it and if you wrote something wrong you got a bad grade, obviously. There was always instructions to write essays and maybe that was the reason why I hated it so much, the writing part. Not only that but it was like my writing was so terrible, every time I got my paper back, there was so many grammar mistakes I didn’t see. Also getting a lot of comments back from my teachers about how my sentences didn’t make sense through some and most of my middle and high school. 

     During my Junior year, I had an english teacher that was so passionate about teaching students how to write well,  she really wanted us to get used to writing well for college. Writing essays was different with her, she always gave us options in what we, the class, wanted and what we were comfortable with. 

       Yea that’s definitely when my perspective on writing changed. Also, my writing itself got better, I no longer had a ton of comments from my teachers what was wrong about my writing and it felt good. It was like taking baby steps and I didn’t realize how my writing got better throughout the year. This class helped me to continue writing my essays better. 

      During Senior year, I took classes that were college level to prepare myself for actual college. Surprising I had like a writing awakening sort of thing which actually came from my science college course. We were watching a movie about the Soviet Union and it’s time around there and the assignment was to write a three page essay on the movie. It was that kind of writing like a movie critic. I honestly don’t think I had ever worked so hard on an essay before, I guess because it was a college class I had to up my game. At first I was so anxious about how the paper would trim out, I saw that movie three times before I actually started writing and just going back to specific scenes here and there. Of course there was a prompt but it was really vague, just comparing that time period to this time period. I worked on it a couple of days until about one in the morning just writing and rewriting and fixing grammar and all that. After watching it so many times I thought that maybe I overdid it, but in my head Iknew this was going to be worth it. While writing it, I felt so proud of myself that I was able to accomplish a big assignment like that. 

    When I got that paper back, right on top was a one hundred and a small smile. I looked through the pages and had no comments and when I saw the rubric all it said was “perfect paper”. This moment felt like the greatest achievement I had ever done in my educational years and yet all it was just one assignment.

     Not only did he write that on my paper, my teacher had said “ there was only one paper that got a one hundred, I didn’t have to write anything, it was perfectly written, the best paper I have ever read in my whole life of teaching”. In my head I finally got the feedback from the teacher I wanted for my writing. 

      He said “Nataly you did an amazing job”. 

 

Due Sept 18: Please post your revised literacy narratives.  Think of a title that encapsulates your piece!

Click on the “Literacy Narrative” category option when posting.

Peruse your classmates’s stories about how they became the readers and writers and thinkers they are today. What can we learn about the role of reading and writing today as a result of these shared pieces?