The Challenges I Learned From Spanish To The Teacher

I was born in Vietnam, and moved to the United State when I was ten years old. The biggest obstacle that I have encountered is the ability of reading and writing . I could not speak, read, and write fluently in English like other people. I did not know why it took me so much time to read a few pages when other kids were almost done with a chapter. I did not know why other kids are doing their essays in the span of a few hours, when I needed to spend a couple days to finish my essays. I have spent eight years of my life of working on my English skills and I am not satisfied with the result. This causes me so much frustration. My earliest memory about reading, writing, and speaking in English was very unpleasant for me. In the many years of learning a second language, Mrs. B helped me start to learn a new language, Mrs. Jon helped me to read better, and Mrs. Remsburg showed me the basic progress that the beginning writers should have.

I would check out books simply because we were told to, not because I was actually going to read and enjoy them. My interest in reading died down completely. It wasn’t that reading was difficult for me, I was just lazy and didn’t want to read. My STAR Reading test scores also started to go down hill. I never got a bad score, but I stopped getting the advanced scores that I used to get before. In middle school, we started to really focus on writing papers, which before, I felt that writing was my strong suit in English class because I have always had teachers tell me that I excelled at writing. I felt that way until I failed a paper we were assigned to write in 7th grade. I don’t remember much about the paper because I’ve tried to push it out of my memory as best as I could, but what I do remember is, it was a persuasive essay and apparently I didn’t do an amazing job at persuading my teacher it was good enough. Since failing what I thought was an essay deserving of an A, I became discouraged and uniterested in

In high school, I decided to take honors classes to help advance myself. I was a struggle bus at first, but I honestly felt like it was the end of the world. I may or may not have shedded a few tears. My mom kept telling me everything will be okay and I knew it would be eventually. However, I soon began to realize that I am Molly Luther, and I can do this. With lots of tears and late nights, I began to get the hang of this difficult reading. A teacher of mine helped me tremendously with getting back on track. She made me much more confident in my writing and reading. Reading was something that I actually enjoyed again. I was able to find my favorite genres and found out some of my favorite

As I began elementary school I was in ESL and in regular classes. My first language was Spanish but I also spoke the minimum of English. However, my speaking and understanding of English weren't sufficient enough to comprehend in class. Elementary school was hard for me because I was still not comprehending a lot even though my English improved. My parents tried their best to help me with schoolwork. It was until middle school my mother started to work. Without both my parents being there to help me I didn't know what to do. I knew that they would not always be able to help me. In order to take care of my

I believe this is the best thing that could have happened to me. By the spring, I was already reading at a fifth grade level. Mrs. Littlefield was the teacher who really encouraged me to keep reading. In our first grade classroom, we had a baseball diamond. Each of the bases were set up for some type of activity to reinforce the phonics sounds we were learning. When we got to home plate, we had a reading group time with the teacher. I didn’t really care for this, because I felt I was held back waiting on others to read. I know it was beneficial to the learning process, but at the time, I would have rather read by myself. At night, I remember reading to myself out loud. My brothers would often complain because they couldn’t concentrate to read their books with me reading aloud. Fortunately my mother always came to my

I put in practice some words that I learned in school. I started having short conversations in English with different people because I had expanded my vocabulary. I would always carry a computer with me because it was helpful . The computer help translate the words I didn’t know. I also stopped being self-conscious because I had to try to speak in English if I wanted to learn more . I mispronounced some words , but I learned from that because someone else would say it correctly . I felt very proud because I was overcoming my obstacle. Additionally, I felt like I was fitting in , and my grades continued to go up. I also was eligible to play in the soccer team. As a result,I can say that the language barrier was an obstacle that made me a stronger person because I overcame the obstacle that life put in my path. Moreover , I never gave up, and I think that’s what life's about. In effect, my GPA is 3.5 now when it used to be 2.0 or lower. These 3 years of high school have been challenging , but I have been putting effort. I am getting more fluent with the language. I am prepared for the next challenge, which is

My situation was similar to the boy’s story from Puanani’s story, and he has struggled with reading and solving math problems. The difficulty of speaking and learning English has isolated me from others. Making new friends and learning things in school are extremely rough as an English language learner. I still remember the fear of getting lost in the strange place during my first week of school as a Middle school kid here in American. The place where I lived is like 15 minutes walking distance from the school. One day I was walking home from school and somehow I got lost. Without a cell phone and not known the street from where I lived were extremely scared for me. I was only able to speak very little English at that time, and that restricted me from asking for help from others. Having trouble finding my way home on a cold and snowy day was the worst. I used to hate the fact that I am an immigrant and only speak very little English, however, this has become something that I would always be grateful and appreciated for in

In the book Speak, we have been introduced to 4 teachers as of now, Mr.Freeman Mr.Neck Hairwoman and the Spanish teacher. Hairwoman reminds of a very happy on the outside and depressed on the inside kind of person. She has orange and black hair, she is kind of drooping about, you can’t see her face because of all of her hair. I imagine her to be pushing her students and making them do lots of unnecessary work. Mr.Neck, this teacher already doesn’t like our main character, he seems like a teacher only liked by few. The good kids who did their work. He seems very stingy not the kind of teacher that you would want to be angry at you, he works for lunch duty, and looks like he would avoid connecting to students that do not like his opinions. Mr.

My first encounter with English was at my mother’s workplace. I picked up some words when my mother spoke to customers, but had no idea what each word meant. When school started, I didn’t talk to anyone since most of them spoke English so I felt like an outcast. Still, I tried my best to do well in English, however in fourth grade kids found it humorous that I struggle when I spoke English and they would bully me. When they teased me I would get frustrated and would sit there sobbing and feeling morose for hours and hours. Finally elementary school was over and its time to go to middle school

There have been very few books that I have changed in relation to the amount I 've been forced to read and in the amount that exist / I 've enjoyed a few Greek tragedies like the story of promethius or atlas, world war z, do androids dream of electric sleep, many of Isaac Asimov 's books, many of Arthur C Clarke 's books as well, some H.P. Love craft works, 1984, starship troopers, anthem and the halo book series. Not that I don 't enjoy reading, I read everyday as a matter of fact but they tend to be news articles, opinion pieces, forums, academic journals in the sciences, Wikipedia entries and so on but not any books. I 've never really enjoyed the books that were specifically assigned to be read in school and books I did enjoy I read earlier like anthem or Fahrenheit 451. Reading at school always to me seemed like an act in futility since I didn 't enjoy it since the material wasn 't very interesting to me and that I already a more than generous amount on my own on the internet but that never counted and the material certainly wasn 't covered in the computer quizzes that also gave one special reading points in elementary school. However the first interesting books that I did read I was enthralled by. Not only because of the interesting stories but also because of the various philosophical implications. I particularly enjoyed the trope of an ancient precursor civilization that is used in many scifi today, something started by Arthur C Clarke. Even today the most

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.

In Spanish, we are learning about what we like to do, but learning this made me think about what we can do. I mean, in lots of countries they can't go take dance lessons or go swim in a clean pool.

the day and English at night, but my transition was harder due to my poor foundations of the English language. I now had to speak, write, and read in English, when I preferred my native language, Spanish. Immaculate Heart Elementary School provided a tutor to help me read from the textbooks in my third grade class. I had difficulty communicating with the teacher and classmates. I felt embarrassed for not understanding English, and sad knowing that it was hard to speak with my Spanish accent. Even though I was placed in such an unfamiliar and difficult situation, I enjoyed the educational atmosphere. I felt safer in an environment where I had some individual attention. I began to write essays about various social studies related topics such as the 41st President of the United States and the Statue of Liberty. I recall spending a lot of my time thinking about the ideas I should mention in those essays, but I spent even more time trying to get those thoughts on lined paper. I wondered whether I was saying things the correct way. I felt behind compared to the other student in my class. I didn?t know the basics of grammar, like when to use ?is? and not ?are?, when everyone else had mastered that area of study. I struggled thinking in Spanish and

My reading experiences have always been enjoyable. I love to read when I find an interesting book. It’s easy for me to be sucked into a book if the story catches my eye. I mostly like to read teen romance novels. They appeal to me simply because of my interest in a love story. My parents hate buying me books because they know I’ll be finished reading within a week or so. Reading has always been really easy to me. It seems almost natural to be sucked into other worlds. The words start to flow over the pages and suddenly it feels like I’m not even reading anymore. Unless I have to read a book for school or it doesn’t catch my attention, I might have a hard time bringing myself to read it.

When I was a kid, I learnt how to read from my siblings because my parents didn’t know how too. They would tell my sibling to teach me because they did not want me to unprepared when I enter pre-school. The first thing they made me do was to memorize the entire alphabet and also read it out loud to them. As my siblings taught me, my parents would stand aside and say motivation things in Spanish like “Si puedes mijo” or “ponele ganas porque tu vas hace inteligente un dia”. Something I could recall from the past is my sister read to me in the afternoon. She had a collection of Junie B Jones book, which she would usually read to me after she finished her homework. Sometimes she’ll have me read out loud some lines and would correct me when I would mispronounce a word. I would usually get frustrated when I wasn’t able to pronounce a word, but she would make me sound it out and memorize so I won’t forget how to pronounce the next I