Luis Gonzalez
I am in my cold air-conditioned classroom during the summer in my Ela class. Our teacher gave us an assignment that was going to be due at the end of the week. I was a very scared shy kid, this was because I was a terrible speller, I only spoke Spanish at home. My parents didn’t know anything about the American culture they were immigrants from Mexico. In class, I felt like I never fitted in, I was always embarrassed and got bullied when they picked on me to share. My classmates laughed at my writing, I hated this class it was very difficult for me. I found it very hard to express myself because of the cultural difference. The assignment was about a happy family moment, First, I couldn’t get started with an idea to write about. I listened to all my friends and how they had these amazing family moments. Going to Disneyland, the movies amusement parks, road trips, and other cool things and felt like my family was boring. I felt this way because my family wasn’t going through their best moments. We were immigrants that had just recently migrated into the united states four years ago . My father wasn’t making much money, I had not had made friends or anyone I can communicate with. Too help me improve and work on my English. I was the oldest sibling and when one is the oldest sibling you are the first at everything. My parents did not know English they couldn’t read or write when I came home with homework, I struggled with something that would have been so easy to complete in 30 mins took me two or more hours to complete. My mother had bought a dictionary to translate the words from an assignment from English to Spanish. My mother would have spent hours every night trying to learn some English from these picture dictionaries. When I came home with this assignment, I was sad this was because I knew this assignment would take my whole night to write. My mother tried her best we looked up the words in the dictionary and found some words, The words couldn’t find in the dictionary my mother just combined English and Spanish. I felt we had written a great piece of writing. I was extremely happy with what I wrote. Learning English was never easy at any point in the journey. It took me a long time I was always getting yelled at and hit by my mom she lost her patience with me at times for spelling things wrong or losing focus. As an eight-year-old kid, all I wanted to do was play with their toys and go outside to play ball. After a long night of thinking about what I was going to write about I came up with the time, I went to my cousin’s house for Christmas. The next day at school we had writing time I tried to organize my writing but every time… I got stuck on how to express myself. I couldn’t write things; I would have asked this girl that sat next to me to help out with spelling words, she would have helped me but got irritated at times. I went home that day finished my work it was a long night looking through the dictionary and getting yelled at. Friday finally came around kids presented their work. They had cool stories to tell, their writing seemed great. My turn came around I started reading it was good since I had gotten help from my teacher the first few sentences. Once I got deeper into my writing piece, I had a lot of misspellings, and my sequence was all out of order. The kids made fun of me they thought my writing was ridiculous. They had said things like your dumb my baby sister can write way better than you!!. Even my teacher was upset, she was like you didn’t give it much effort. Did you even spend any time on your writing? Deep down knowing I had spent all night trying to write that writing piece getting yelled at. I was also mad at my mom because I had listened to her trying to help me with words that we had struggled translating or finding. After this happened for a while every time writing class came around, I felt so terrible. And this led to becoming shy, I felt like I didn’t belong there. When I sat in the middle of the classroom sometimes, I zoned off and my grades started decreasing. But ultimately my mother found ways for me to improve my reading and writing skills through fun activities. She also started taking me to the Saturday programs the school offered, to help improve my learning. This event shaped the way I looked at school for a while. I felt like I was not advancing in my learning, And I took it like my teachers didn’t know the way I was feeling. I believe a huge factor of this was because of my background coming from another country. I only spoke Spanish and the English my mother spoke was broken, I started picking it up the same way we spoke it at home. The interaction I had with American culture was different than what other kids in my class had. When a topic in school came up, it was not interesting to me, or had no idea what they were talking about, and this was because of the racial difference. But this helped me understand and learn that if I wanted to become a better writer or reader. I had to practice my reading and writing, I studied more consistently and learned to not be afraid of being judged. One learns to not let other people’s opinions get to you but to take them into consideration to help one grow with the difficulties one may face.
