Emmanuel Williams
English 1101
Professor Brianna Jewell
From ignorance to a Learner
When it comes to reading, writing, and learning I wasn’t always the best at it. But I have come a long way to get better with all three categories, which made me a better person in general. When I was younger I never really liked the idea of understanding how to read because it was never really that interesting to me. As I grew up my reading and writing improved because my parents have pushed me to get better. My dad was the one who taught me how to write better, while my mom was the one that taught me how to read and comprehend work. During the week when I had finished my homework my mom will call me to read with her for 30 minutes before I went to bed. We were doing that for the 6th grade until I got better, and the weekends I had to read for 2 hours. My dad though taught me to write was when I was younger. He would sit both of us down and write out letters and sentences for the week until my writing became better. In school when it was time to read out loud it was a struggle to know when to pause and when not to, but as I dedicated to reading more the better I got at it. I had to make time for myself to read on the weekends with my free time to have a better understanding of reading. Meaning that I had to focus upon myself to become adequate in my pronunciation and the use of my punctuation as well. I also had to make sure I understood what was going on in the reading, so that meant I had to be asked analytical questions about the text and I had to be quizzed on. At one point I moved to a middle school where I was tested on my reading skills. I didn’t have any idea about how good or bad I was doing, but the results showed that I was actually pretty bad and needed a lot of work. Same thing with my writing because it had a large number of grammatical errors and it didn’t really make any sense what I was writing about. Learning for me took a ton out of me since I was a child who would rather play a lot, but I had no choice at this point in time I had to learn as much as possible and fast too because I had to catch up to the other kids in my class. Over time I grew in my skills in reading, and I even took it upon myself to actually read on my own time and start enjoying reading books. I took the most exciting-fictional books that were interesting to me and read for the joy of it. This ultimately made me a better writer, especially now that I knew more about grammar and how punctuations worked. Additionally, I became happier knowing that part of my potential was unlocked because of accelerated successes. I was able to get better grades, especially in my writing and reading classes.
Even though American charter schools helped me to get to the point where I am, there is still work to get done in the American education system. Not every school can give access to books and extra help for students to get better, and not every parent or tutor in America is able to teach a child how to get better in the English language. If there were more fun activities or maybe even challenges to get kids reading more, then there will be a promising education system in America.
