Personal Narrative: A Warning During Spanish II Class

I am a native Spanish speaker, English teacher, writer and translator from Venezuela. I have 5 years of experience in the field of general/legal translations and about the same time as a creative writer.

The final weeks of my first semester in college are coming to an end. My Columbus State english class has written a total of three projects, and a total of four papers. There are a lot of grammatical issues that, at the beginning of the year, I had issues on. However, I have improved on these errors drastically, and have become a better writer because of it. Even though I am still working on many aspects of my writing, I do believe that I have become a better writer. I believe that my biggest issues while writing are run on sentences, making a strong thesis statement, and having quotes stand alone at the beginning of a paragraph.

Since my early years, I was pushed into engineering because I excelled in math and science. I took an interest in bioengineering but my heart was not there. It was just a placeholder but I was not truly passionate about it and to me that was unsatisfactory. I wanted to change my major, but to what I had not known. Going into my junior year, I was afraid my time was running out. My whole life changed when my counselor asked me,” Spanish 3 or AP Psychology?”. Having already taken two years of spanish, I opted to take the AP class. I was immediately intrigued in the subject. I went to class everyday eager to learn. I liked psychology so much because it was easily applicable to real life. I would identify things I had learned in class in and have

Every year, a few days before Christmas break, my Spanish teacher hosts a Christmas party for all of the faculty. The students in his Spanish four class are responsible for preparing Hispanic influenced cuisine. However, the whole fiesta is coordinated by those brave enough to venture into AP Spanish. Although I’m in the level four course, my teacher assigned me as the chief organizer and décor extraordinaire. We only had four weeks to pull everything together so time was of the essence. By infusing a lot of positive energy and publicity about the occasion, we managed to spread the news and excitement among the faculty. Despite a few challenges with communication and organization, we managed to pull it off with great success. The teachers

“Same here with Spanish. I only know the common words but not all of them. If you want me to, then I can teach you German. It’s an easy language to learn. I can tell you that saying hello in German is saying hall with an O at the end: Hall-O.”

I have known my participant for many months previous to this interview so some of this information I already knew while other information was new to me. It is interesting to me to see the different cultures within the same language. Angie is from Columbia so she speaks Spanish as her first language. Within our swim team there are two different cultures within the Spanish speaking teammates, they are from Spain and Bogota, Columbia. All four of our teammates including Angie that are from Columbia have their own little subculture here. When talking about the settings that she speaks each of her languages in it was interesting that she only spoke Spanish to our teammates from Columbia. She discussed how it is natural for her to speak Spanish to the other Columbians because she already knew all of them before coming to America. Unlike the people that are from Spain, she speaks English to all of them. When I ask both types of Spanish about what words to use it is interesting that both of them give me different answers. I feel that the Spanish that the Columbians speak is easier to learn with already knowing English because they do not have as many phonetic differences such as the “z” sound in Spain Spanish is pronounced “th.”

As a Junior, in the spring semester I have grown more as a student and a global citizen.This spring semester I have gained more confidence as taking action and gain more knowledge. I have been able to take action in my community by doing a civil rights project for my AP Language and Composition class. This semester I have grown more knowledge as a student in my Digital Literacy class by creating a Fake News Essay to address how everything that is on the internet or media can be fake.

“Tienes tijeras?” asked a young girl. Not understanding what she had said, I asked her what she needed in English, but she looked back at me with eyes full of confusion. A simple question from one young girl asking for scissors had made me nervous and completely freeze in the moment. Through this, interacting with the children worried me because of the language barrier which would make it twice as hard as interacting with the children at home.

The first semester of my sophomore year I’ve decided to take the AP European History class so it made my first semester kind of difficult, it required for me to do more work that involved reading. This AP European class has helped me grow as a student to communicate ideas, for example my group and I were assigned a scientist and we had to present to the class why our scientist was so important. I have also grown as a student in investigating the world in my English class, we read different articles based on different cases from people around the world.

Looking back to when I typed my first AP Language and Composition paper, I can honestly say that my writing skills have drastically improved. I started off not knowing any writing strategies and thought that typing three pages was a lot for just one paper. After completing the course, I can now write a full eight paged paper using one of the three writing strategies that we learned. Before this class, I was never a skilled writer and the thought of taking APLAC intimidated me because I did not think I was capable of completing the course. I never imagined myself taking this class because In my mind I simply was not smart enough to take it. However, due to all the positive comments I received about the class and how it improved my friends writing, I

In this class, I have learned many new skills to improve my writing, and I have also learned new grammar rules. In regards to my writing, I have learned the importance of freewriting when beginning to write a paper. Additionally, I now know to allow ample time for revising and editing because I can look at my work critically for mistakes and make necessary changes. Furthermore, I have learned about grammar rules such as pronoun-antecedent agreement. This rule is something that I know subconsciously, but being made aware of it has allowed me to find mistakes I make more often.

I have truly enjoyed writing for most of my life and after this class I will continue to enjoy writing hopefully with more skill. I have always viewed myself as a fairly strong writer and this class has reaffirmed that for me, but it has also shown weaknesses in my writing. As an introduction level class this has been one of my favorites; at some point I will take a higher level, even though it is not required for my major. Even though this class is almost over I am continuing to learn. I also love that this class will help me with literally ever other class in my college career. I am not a particularly strong reader, but as my writing skills improve so do the reading skills. While in this class I have learned a lot about everything from what I can improve, to subjects that interest me, and constructing a successful paper.

I believe I have grown a lot since the beginning of this course. My writing was severely lacking grammar and punctuation. I didn’t use any punctuation other than periods and very few commas spersed throughout my papers. My papers still need help in that area, but I have improved. I now know where they need to go and when it’s appropriate to use them. My papers aren’t exactly flawless but they are better than before. I would write how I speak at times and I knew it wasn’t right, but I would still do it because it allowed my papers to flow better in my mind. I read my papers out loud to help avoid my problem with writing how I speak. I’ve learned my writing style in this course, or lack thereof. I found a program that would benefit me now and

Summer vacation, and school ends for about three months, and then you have as much fun as you can, then back to school… right? Well I had to go to summer school, but it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Everything was going fine, I had a job after summer school, and that was going fine as well. They say that summer is supposed to be fun and exciting, and it usually is for me and my family. However in July my father started coughing up blood. My father usually doesn’t make it his top priority to go to the doctors, so he waited about four weeks until he really didn’t feel good.

When I was in eighth grade and my class was choosing our schedules for our first year of high school, I was told that for the diploma I wanted, I would have to take a foreign language. I chose Spanish, because I thought it would be easy. Little did I know that that decision would change my life forever.