Personal Narrative: My Saanic English Teacher

Maya Angelou once said “You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.” With that being said, is it important to take in all the thing people say about you? Personally I don’t think so. We cannot control what happen around us and what people says about us, but we do have the power to avoid getting control by people’s saying. My English learning journey began when I was around 4 years old. For me English is like a second nature; I use it so often that I feel like I’m more connect to it than Chinese. By the time I finish kindergarten my parent wants me to continue my education under a system that involve English. So they decided to send me to an international school. At the start I was thrill by the opportunity, but the best part of all is that I get to study at the same school as my sister.

In life, there are always failures of everything. As college students, we are experiencing endless stress, anxiety and fear failure. I remembered back in my sophomore year, I enroll in this accounting 201 class for my major’s requirement. The first week of class is simple, but after the third and fourth week, it gets harder and harder. There are many business concepts and words that are new to me. It is really hard to catch up in the class, sadly I have failed the first exam. I feel so blue. After that, I go to the professor’s office in purpose to ask him for advises of how to improve in the class. Then he advises me to drop the class because his materials in the class are straightforward and there is nothing he can do to help. It breaks my heart, after hearing him says that.

What is culture? Culture is the idea of what is wrong or right, the concept of what is acceptable within our society. Culture serves us as a guide, taking us to the "right way" and helping us to make sense of things that surrounds us. There are many different cultures around the world. A lot of them are similar in specific ways and others are just completely different, this difference explains why we think that people from different backgrounds are "weird".

My experiences as a writer have been both very engrossing and strenuous. I have learned a great quantity on both reading and writing, though, I continue to struggle on things that I have learned by this time, making the same mistakes that I do not even realize. Sometimes things are not so easy to understand when reading information, especially if the wording of an article is difficult for example. I love the idea of learning new things everyday. These past years as a writer have been very interesting, and I have learned and grasped many concepts I have been taught along the way.

My Freshman year of college, I was a mechanical engineering student at the George Washington University. It was there that I learned how difficult school could really be. My past schooling experience had not prepared me for this extremely rigorous program. As one of my requirements for the program was a social science, I had registered for a history course my first semester. Unknowingly, I had registered for a third-year history class, clearly not the correct class for a freshman engineering student. I went on to struggle with the amount of work that was assigned for the course including an 18 page research paper. This course, on top of the difficult engineering curricula was extremely challenging. At this point, I also realized that although

"The college admissions process can create anxiety. In an attempt to make it less stressful, please tell us an interesting or amusing story about yourself that you have not already shared in your application."

I was in your Rennaissance English class at Horn from 2001- 2004. I attended Stanford University for undergrad before moving to Washington, DC where I taught middle school math. After I left the classroom, I was a coach of first-year math teachers and then began coaching school principals on instructional leadership. This summer I moved to Cambridge, MA where I'm the Chief of Staff for the Achievement

For my inter-ethnic encounter, I interviewed one of my best friends from high school Ashley Arias. Ashley is nineteen years old, so she is a year younger than me. She is currently pursuing a nursing degree at Notre Dame of Maryland University located in Baltimore, Maryland. She is originally from Virginia but now lives in Glen Burnie, Maryland. Her immediate family includes her parents and her younger brother. She also has a bulldog that she has had for three years. I have known Ashley for about seven years, but we have been really close for about five of those years starting during my junior year of high school.

For my first hour, I took an honors course in biology and my teacher, Mrs. Caldwell taught with an iron fist and she would not allow for any excuses. During Freshman year, my high confidence prompted me to push her aside. This was pivotal sd she constantly pushed me to work as hard as possible, nag about my mistakes as much as she could, remind me of my terrible grade in her class on a near daily basis, and call on me to answer as much as possible. As a result of my experience in her course, I felt depressed, my ego was crushed, and my grades started to flounder to a 2.7 gpa during my first semester of school. Still, failure leads to success and I developed the blueprints for success.

“Mamusia! Can you come help me with this?” I yell boldly for my mom. “What is that

My earliest experience with reading and writing were traumatizing especially when I was in the first grade. I still recall the experience I went through to this day. It made me really hate myself because the other kids were making fun of me.

There aren’t many things that stick in a person’s memory for a lifetime. Reading and writing are a few exceptions. I think that everyone has their own story of how they learned, whether they enjoy it or not, and how it has stuck with them to this day. So, here’s mine:

I had decided to delay studying for my extensive anatomy test over all the muscles of the body until the night before the enormous test. I knew that my reasoning was not sound and I should have commenced long before. I came to the resolution to make an effort and learn all of the muscles and pray for a miracle while I took the test. The next day I trudged into my anatomy class with my stomach in my throat. As Mr. Nikiforow passed out the test I felt my nerves kick in instantaneously. I sat in agony as my classmates ploddingly passed the test down the row. I began to glance through the test and I knew at that instant that I would never make the same mistake again. When we received our test back later that week, little to my surprise I had failed. My first initial reaction was “this material was tremendously challenging and everyone else obtained poor grades as well, so Mr. Nik must have done an inadequate job teaching it to us”. I went through the rest of my day attempting to forget about the test, but it seemed to keep popping up in the back of my head. When I arrived home, I decided to address the looming thoughts in the back of my head. My sub par grade on the test was in no way Mr. Nik’s responsibility. The grade instead was a clear representation to the lack of effort I had put forth in studying. Prior to anatomy, I had been able to attain quality grades with minimal studying. Failing my anatomy test presented me with the wake up call that I needed.

In junior year of high school I took an Advanced Placement European History course. Even though I passed the final exam, my overall score in the class was a failing grade. I was never so angry, upset, and embarrassed by a class before.

When I came to the United States at the age of eleven, my whole life changed. It went from "Hola" to "Hello". I was already used to the idea that I was coming, but of course, you don't know the challenges you will be facing until you actually have them in front of you. One those challenges for me was the change of language because I had spoken Spanish for eleven years and zero experience with English. This was a big shock for me because of the fact that I had trouble communicating in school with my peers, my teachers, and sometimes even outside school. This would always scare me because in the scenario where I would need to interact with someone for help and I did not have my mother and my father beside me, how was I going to get the