Graduation Speech : Elementary Crisis

In order to get the help I needed, my mom had to pick me up two hours early from school every day and bring me to Anderson Elementary, where the speech therapist was located. Being forced to leave school early didn't help my social issues. The friends I had turned on me, and I became the weird girl. I no longer had people to eat lunch with, and invitations to birthday parties stopped arriving in the mail. I was mocked on a daily basis by people I had previously considered to be friends. Everyone had their own conspiracy theories about me; it hurt. Along with my new-found social struggles, my grades began to drop and I knew I had to make a

I was very shy and awkward during my adolescent years. A cringe-worthy yet endearing moment of reflection of suppressed memories. I was the fourth child out of five, to two immigrant parents. We were a low income family with no budget for vacations or expensive school trips. Socially I was not accepted. I was always the outlier. Subsequently, I was bullied and it impaired my childhood for quite sometime. I felt as if I was sentenced to social death that I just could not replevy before the end of adolescent years. Other students taunted and jeered at me habitually; even with uncontrollable factors. I specifically remember my Haitian heritage being one of the domineering methods of my torture. I recall that being subjected

Ever since I was a little girl I didn't like reading, doing homework or taking exams. I only enjoyed lunch time, gym time and after school programs. I was always in the top classes because of my mother's connection with teachers in the school until I got into the third grade. That's when you start to take a state exam test and if you failed you either get left back or get put in a class based on your grade score. That's when I went from being in top classes to the bottom classes and realized I had to get it together in school because I didn't want to look like a fool or be a fool. That all changed in middle school, I was always put in programs that helped students who wasn't on top of their work and I started to see my name on the honor roll

Essays have always seemed like just another assignment. Rarely did I like doing them and most of the time I did not like the prompt. Essays were straight forward and very dull. You were given a question about something in class and told to write about it. So far college English has been different. The class takes an abstract point of attack. There is still a prompt but is about more complex and controversial issues. This would have to make me think critically and in an unorthodox manner. This, however, was not my main worry. At the beginning of the year I had two major concerns going into a college level English class. Grammar and mechanics, those are the two words that have always been brought up in parent-teacher conferences or written in red ink on my paper. I was not very worried about making a thesis or analyzing quotes. One thing I rarely did in high school was revision. It was either last minute or I thought the essay was already good enough. The first essay was proof of a lack of revisions. The prompt asked us to take our rough draft, revise it, than make more revisions to that paper so that it can become your final copy. I did not make an attempt to do a revised copy. I did however revise my first draft and went straight the final essay. During this process my analyzing could always be more in depth (clarity was also an issue through out primary and secondary education). Although receiving a slightly better grade on my first paper, it had more mistakes and had less

As a young child, my memory of reading starts with a troubling period in my life. It started in first grade after I had moved to a new school. For me he year kicked off normally, but the further down the road, I found myself struggling to keep up in my reading class. In addition to falling behind in my classes, I was feeling isolated from the other students. My grades started to suffer and everything got worse. We didn’t have a school counselor, so my principal arranged a meeting with my parents to discuss what actions should be taken. My principal told my parents it isn’t uncommon for new students to fall behind in classes and that the move could be causing some of the issues. He recommended that I start attending special education for my reading course. My parents thought it over and explained to me that it was ok and not to be discouraged about this. However,

The first days of school became the saddest days of my life. Not only was I missing my parents, but also I was intimidated. I was used to getting the best grades at my former school; here in New York, I was something different, somehow less. I neither liked nor understood what was happening to me. Because of my inability to speak fluently, and without inventing words, a few weeks after trying to fit in at school I decided to give up. I limited my social life to talk only to Spanish speakers, I did well in every subject except for English, and I lost all my interest in learning proper

I was one of the tallest people in my grade, and was super skinny. With my mild Cerebral Palsy, I had speech problems for a long time. Due to all of this, I didn’t exactly fit in. Every day as I walked in the doors, I would completely shut down. My grades fell, and I blocked most of the world out. I could here the “popular” groups whispering and giggling every time I walked in the hall and notes would be passed around in class. I sat at a table in the corner by myself, I didn’t have any friends in

In the First Grade I had Mrs. Stevens as a teacher. Ms. Stevens was about 35 or 40 at the time, 2002, in Alba Michigan. Ms. Stevens had grown up and went to the same school her entire life. This school was very very small, an average of 12 students per graduating class it was a K-12Th. The county was a population was about 1000 and less than 150 kids in the school. In 2000 my mom fought for Asperger diagnosis and the school at the time did not have a single teacher who was certified in special education. Along with this diagnosis came with an ADD diagnosis. The class was small, there was 7 kids in the class and my friend Jahkaya and I were the only girls in the class. Jahkaya was also the only person of color in the entire school.

I was told my Hebrew language skills were not up to par with the schools expectations and so I was forced to transfer to a “Yechud” (lower level) class for my Hebrew subjects. My English skills were up to par and remained in the mainstream class; however, my new class experience changed as compared to the enjoyable sixth grade school year. In sixth grade I was the popular girl, everyone loved me for my kindness and willingness to help others in need, but after transferring to the “Yechud” class my mainstream classmates looked down at me as if I obtained mental disability that changed who I was. At the start of the seventh grade school year, I went from the popular girl to the stupid girl. I was an embarrassment to my classmates nobody wanted to be seen with a “Yechud” girl. The “Yechud” class had a separate lunch table at the end of the huge lunchroom excluded from the rest of the school. Instead of allowing the blistering hot waters to dissolve my self-esteem I took the piping hot pain and casted it up to the heavens never once bringing it down. Horrid confrontations from my evil classmate cannot take control over my strong mind, I refused to believe their nasty words. Moving forward and trying to be the best possible student was my only option. It didn’t matter what people thought, the only thoughts that mattered was my own. Continuing my journey in the boiling waters of hell was the only way to create my fully cooked pasta and manifest a perfect dish. Callous and insolent students cannot define me, I am Michal Tempelberg whether I was in the “Yechud” class or not. Kindness, lovingness, and robust determination will always be my strong

Growing up, I was the short skinny kid who played all of the sports and was always surprisingly better than I was supposed to be. I went to an elementary school of five guys in my grade and were nothing like me in any way. School has always been hard for me, even in elementary school because all of the teachers treated me like the kid with a disability. They always put me in the “slower” groups for all of my subjects except for Physical Education, which was the only class that I excelled in for all of elementary school. But, even in sports like basketball and baseball, I was always put on the B team because I was too small and not strong enough. I didn’t have anything going for me at all. I had braces 2nd-6th grade, hit puberty before everyone else so I had bad acne as a 3rd grader, got a 0/20 on my adding simple fractions test, and was in the Cow group for English(The slowest group possible). I took elementary school as motivation for who I am now as a senior in high school to better myself and prove everyone I

I struggled with social anxiety and attention deficit disorder. These disabilities were challenged daily by the standard learning expectations. The task of comprehending material was strenuous, which made me consider dropping out on multiple occasions. The teachers were puzzled on how to help me learn and assigned me into a special education class. Special education educators soon discovered that I was further advanced than the other students in that class. Educators were stumped on how to benefit my disabilities and decided to keep me in the special education classes. I felt misplaced and misunderstood that lead me to start behaving in inappropriate manners. This behavior caused my life to spiral downwards. Some claimed that the disability was all in my head and that it was just an excuse. Over the summer, I was trapped inside learning while I watched other children my age playing. To this day, I still struggle with the balance of work and

When I first started elementary school I was a normal kid that loved recess just like every other kid my age. As I began to get older I started to noticed that I struggled with my reading skills, which started to affect my writing skills also. One day in third grade, my teacher Ms. Martin took me outside the classroom and told me that everyday starting tomorrow I would be going to a reading class for an hour each day where all I had to do was read to a mentor. At first I was really embarrassed that I needed the extra help with my reading and no one else in my class did. When I got back into the classroom I told my friends why she wanted to talk to me out in the hall and I began to tell them that I got to leave the classroom for an hour each

As a child I suffered from severe stuttering. I came to America at the age of five therefore, English is not my primary language. This made it difficult for me to learn English. I had the capacity to develop abstract ideas and understood what was being told to me. I could not articulate what I wanted to say. I didn’t not have the ability to communicate with others around me. My stuttering was so severe that it stunted my progress in learning English. The bullying I received in school caused me to become mute for sometime. My perspective at that time was detrimentally negative. In my mind if I am being bullied for the way I talk than why talk at all. My elementary school ended putting me in ESOL and special needs classes. I did not apply myself in school at all and had a lot of unpleasant behavioral incidents. People don’t talk about this much, but I whole heartedly feel like my school kept me in special needs classes because they receive funding for the amount of special needs children they have. When I reached fourth grade my ESOL teacher looked at my FCAT scores and fought for me to be put in a regular class. She motivated me to apply myself, which I did. They eventually took me out of special needs, gave me more hours of ESOL and made me work with an SLP. Overtime, my stuttering decreased tremendously. Now, when I get nervous my stuttering comes through but not as much as before.

In school I have always been a relatively successful student, and I was always considered one of the smarter kids by my parents and a lot of the other students. In about sixth grade when they started to split the grade up into certain classes for the “advanced” kids and the kids that weren’t considered advanced. I was in the classes with all the kids that weren’t considered advanced. At the time though, I didn’t realize what they were doing or that I wasn’t actually considered a smart kid by the school, I just knew all my friends were in classes I wasn’t in, and it really upset me. I got put in the classes with a bunch of kids I didn’t like, or just people I didn’t know, and had never seen before. I still had the bus where I got to see a few of my friends, but other than that, they just weren’t around.

English class seemed to be the most dreadful to take within school. Writing essays for most of my grade in a class is not what I was looking forward too. When I entered college I knew that it would be one of many challenging classes I would have to take. Starting from the lowest English class to moving on up, the writing assignments became longer and more thought out. The time came when I got into this class that I knew more work was going to have to be put into essays and thus brought out what I had not seen before in my work progress.