Literacy Narrative

My experiences with reading, writing and speaking is what made English not my favorite subject. I’ve had a few experiences in which I thought the English language might not be as hard as I think it is but whenever my teacher would give us an assignment that most of the time required a lot of reading and writing it always reminded me how hard English really is to me. The fact that English is not my first language has always discouraged me to try and be perfect at it because I thought that no matter how hard I tried I’ll never be as good as my “American” classmates. I only started taking English in fourth grade and my teachers were never American so I never learned the language properly or the way I always wanted to. Until I went to high school here and all of a sudden I’m taking difficult english courses. I remember the first week of this English class my teacher gave out poems and stories to read and asked us to write analysis, write 4 page essays about what the author is trying to say, figure out the tone and asked us to figure out things I never even heard about and was never taught, she said that her course over the next couple of years should prepare us for the AP test and that if we do good in her class we would do great on the AP test .I panicked when I heard what she expected of us in her class and also thought ‘wow I’ll never do good on that AP test and will probably fail this class’. Because I found myself in a class where all of my other classmates were American or at least spoke the language since they were very young and understood everything she was talking about and all of them could write at least 2 page essays in one class and I was the only one who was seriously struggling. I also didn’t know anyone in my class to ask for help or relate to so that just added to my anxiety. After class I decided that I needed to speak to my teacher to explain to her my situation and ask her if I needed to be taking an easier English course because I genuinely thought I was going to fail,  but she reassured me and told me that she is willing to go over my essays with me and give me tips on how to improve my writing and that if I pay close attention to her in class I’d be fine. She suggested that I fit in the front too. She really helped me overcome a big struggle and she gave me hope that it’s not as impossible as I thought it was. After thinking that I would never pass the class I actually ended up passing her class and getting a really good score on the Ap test. 

English is still not my strong suit but the way I struggled with it taught me a lot. It taught me to believe in myself and that if I set my mind to something, it’s achievable. 

A lot of people don’t like change(and I’m one of them) but change is inevitable and change doesn’t always mean something bad or negative, you might think it is but either way you’ll always end up learning something from it.