When I was a little girl, I disliked writing my Chinese name, 馮慧櫻 (fung4 wai6 ying1). It takes 48 strokes to write my name, but it takes my friend 22 strokes to write hers; so, my hands are always sore. Every time I pressed my Hello Kitty pencil hard against the paper to write this torture, it felt like I had completed, stamped, and published a whole Chinese narrative about me. When I immigrated from Hong Kong to San Francisco, my four-year-old self was relieved. I didn’t have to write in Chinese anymore! However, I quickly learned that I would have to learn a new language, English...and not a single person in my family spoke English. But, in America, I discovered a new way of writing that I really enjoy. I love to write in code.
Compared to English, Chinese was much harder- each character has a different meaning, but each character may sound similar to many others. Even though many may believe that English seems much easier than Chinese, looking back now, I believe that my attitude towards English was too arrogant.
When I was four years old, my older sisters, Nadia and Zoe, used to pretend to be teachers and taught me the alphabet. When I went into pre-school, I had to learn the alphabet again. When I reached kindergarten, I had to learn it for the third time. So for three years of
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The final assignment for the class brought an incredible opportunity for me to find my style in programming: we were allowed to create anything we wanted, and I wrote my first computer game, Catcher. In the game, the player catches falling objects from the sky and accumulates points to win. It was a challenging project, since I had no prior experience coding games. I had not even seen game code before, but I enjoyed it so much. The Catcher project allowed me to truly express myself through the lines of code. Through writing computer programs, I had found my
In “Class in American,” Mantsios offers evidence to challenge the idea that everyone in the United States has an equal chance to succeed. Mantsios offers three different American Profiles. Each person in the different profiles worked hard, but they all came from very different classes; they also lived very different lifestyles due to the fact that they came from these different classes. These three different American Profiles helped Mantsios challenge the idea that everyone in the United States has an equal chance to succeed, because they provided proof (from similar areas, all ambitious, hard-working) that even with all these similarities their lives were still drastically different. The explanation of spheres of power and oppression is most closely related to Mantios’ position on the causes of inequality, because he believes these two things are the most to blame for keeping individuals from succeeding. He explains that these are things are out of a person’s control (race, gender, what class an individual is born into), which may be most to blame for not having an equal chance to succeed.
Social class is a topic of discussion that most Americans do not like to talk about. It can be harder to identify than racial or ethnic differences, yet in many ways is the most important indicator of what kind of financial and educational opportunities someone is granted. When money or success is talked about, people tend to favor the form of “meritocracy” which is the fair competition for success among all people no matter race, gender, or family history. Unfortunately, this is not the reality and there is a huge correlation between success, and factors such as race, gender, education level, and inheritance. With the odds being stacked against minorities, women, and those living below the poverty line experience obstacles that limit personal success. In his text, Class in America, Gregory Mantsios examines the myths and realities behind the truth about class in America and its universal influence on the lives of Americans. He argues that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer due to many different factors. Similarly, in her text, Serving in Florida, author Barbara Ehrenreich writes about her experiences working multiple minimum wage jobs to make ends meet after going undercover in the working class life. She argues that people working minimum wage jobs are treated very poorly, and receive pay that isn’t enough to get by. Ehrenreich’s essay effectively illustrates Mantsios’ claim by offering a personal account that showed how lower
In the beginning of the 1600s, the first English settlements were established in America. Over time, as they started building their colonies, the migration and population growth of the Europeans increased. This change affected American life in both, positive and negative ways. The English introduced various crops to the natives such as, corn, potatoes, beans and many more. With the help of the natives, this led the agricultural growth in America to increase. They also introduced tobacco, which soon dominated the trade routes and medicinal usage was also practiced. The English established political and religious institutions and educated the locals living in the New World. Advanced weaponry was brought by the English which the natives soon learned
‘America’ is in Tertiary Form (ABA). The first A Section is the repetitive main melody sung by Anita (Verse Chorus) about America and her positive and outlook on America. And the section makes use of the arpeggios (I like to be in America)
Arlington High School is truly lucky to have Mr. Sheldon, a former valedictorian at MIT, teaching computer science. His class was revelatory for me in my freshman year. The course was centered around learning to code in Processing through small projects. Under his guidance, I was able to make dinky little games using the most basic programming techniques. I distinctly remember my sense of accomplishment upon turning in a barely playable knockoff of Line Runner for my first independent project of the year. Now, looking back on this code gives me anxiety. It was nothing more than a bunch of redundant global variables and if-statements - blasphemous! However, my programming practices did improve slightly over the year; I was making eventually using arrays and loops to streamline my programs. Code is truly like a language - one can see the progress of their computer literacy in the quality of the code they write. The drive to learn programming which begun in this class has led me to spend considerable amount of my free time furthering my literacy. I’ve since dabbled in many different programming languages on my own time, such as HTML to make websites and C# in Unity to make video games. Now, my code is a chocolatey combination of classes and abstraction which I can be truly proud
When I was three years old. My grandma took me to her house and made me learn how to write everyone’s name. Including my name that was the easiest out of the 30 names I had to learn how to write. While my grandma was teaching my how to write. I learned that I was writing in
When I was about five or six my parents bought me a keyboard and I took keyboard lessons for a couple of years. Although, I think I was a little too young and the instructor smoked like a chimney so I did not continue with the lessons. I still have that keyboard and still remember a little
When writing about America, never - and I do mean never - use the words “Americans” and “education” in the same title, unless you have “lack of” or a synonym for it between the two. As well, it is also quite fine if you add “Trump” to the title to make it clear to the rest of the world that he accurately describes how every American thinks. Talking about the many different subcultures that make up the United States is off limits - stick with the south, the Bible Belt. Because if you mention progressive areas like San Francisco and Seattle, it won’t help your cause. You don’t want that. So please stay with the south. It will help.
My first breath of air was in America, but my first words were in China. I spent the earlier parts of my childhood in a country on the other side of the world, making friends with faces I can barely recall and making memories that sparked a feeling of both clarity and vagueness. Although I had spent that time speaking only Mandarin, my mind started to absorb itself into English and dialect once I came back. Now, my conversations with my parents are a mix of dialect, Mandarin, and English – a parade of confusion for the untrained ear.
English classes in high school and middle schools tend to focus more on the writing part of the subject, and I actually used to think English classes and writing classes were the same. Therefore, it was surprising for me to learn new material in Dr. Holterhoff’s class Visual Culture, Digital Archives, and H. Rider Haggard. This class focused more on making posters that help you be convincing, as well as presentation skills. We also learned how to analyse the posters in a written format so that a person reading it, or hearing the presentation, could understand the reasoning behind a particular format for a project. Throughout the semester, this English class helped me the most by introducing me to a wide array of possibilities for conducting
While growing up in my house, I was always the youngest and I had three school-age siblings that would do homework at the kitchen table every day. At 4 years old, I was a very jealous kid and wanted to fit in with my older brothers and sisters. I already knew how to say the alphabet and knew how each letter looked. My mom, thought of a wonderful solution when it came to doing school work, she wrote my name in a dotted pattern and asked me to trace them and I could pretend to be like my siblings. Because of this, the first thing I learned to write was my name. By the time they finished their homework, I had written my first and last name about ten times.
sisters loved to play “school” with me. We had a whiteboard set up in our bedroom, and even an old wooden desk. My sisters taught me letters, words, and we worked our way up to sentences. By the time I entered preschool I had learned all my letters, and how to read a little. My time in preschool enhanced my comprehension greatly, and by the time I reached kindergarten I could read. And reading I did. My love for reading and knowledge took off.
When my father asked me to volunteer as a teaching assistant for the kindergarten class at the local Chinese school, I was apprehensive. Although I liked kids, helping my little brother with his alphabet strained my patience, so I imagined introducing kids to another language when they were just beginning to learn their own would be much worse. Fortunately, my worries were soon appeased. The teacher had endless patience and the nine children were as precocious as they were adorable. In the following months, as they learned the colors, numbers, and body parts in Chinese, I learned their favorite colors, what they wanted to be when they grew up, and what made them giggle. I discovered that working with children was as much of a trial of communications
To my disbelief, I spent more time studying and learning GW-BASIC and then developing my program, than I ever spent on any subject in the past. Nonetheless, I stuck with the agreement. By the end of the semester, not only did I write my first program; somehow, I managed to become a member of the Gilmore Junior High School Math & Science Team. To this day, I have no idea how I went from being a break-dancing super star and trendsetter to openly sharing soda and chips over the unveiling of the team’s new Apple IIe computer, especially with students I considered socially challenged. As I matured and moved from programming to advanced systems, this experience became the foundation of how I would approach learning technology and working on teams where people embraced different values.
During my early childhood, I was being raised by my grandparents at their old farm. Despite being born in the United States, I had a unique uprising since my parents sent me to live with their parents; they resided in China. I don’t remember much of my early childhood but what I do remember is mostly the languages that I heard. My grandparents taught me both basic Fujianese and Mandarin.