An Experience Misjudging and Improving

One particular moment from my life where language and literacy played a role was In High school it’s called the NYESLAT test, which is meant for students who are learning English as a second language. But i was confused and i was fussing about it cause i only speak english and I don’t speak another language that comes first. I really didn’t understand why I was taking the test. It was also annoying because the test was for 3 hours I think. Taking  away your lunch time and hanging out with friends outside. I kept complaining about it to my advisory teacher back in high school, we went to the main office to discuss it to the assistant principal and said it’s in my school system, I even talked to my mom about it and told me it was from an elementary school i attended in the bronx from 2012-14 where I spent my Kindergarten and 1st grade years over there. I feel like I was misjudged based on my ethnicity or looks probably, (I didn’t come to the united states, i was born in this country), Furthermore, around 11th grade my mom signed something to prevent me from taking the test in the school, which I felt happy and freed because I was a misjudged student.     

Another moment from my life where language and literacy played a role was high school, this was in 12th grade, June of this year my government teacher assigned all of us a soapbox project, the instructions was to pick a topic that you want to write about , then you would be paired in a small group and a teacher and present the topic to them in the library, my reaction to this was a facepalm, cause it’s almost the end of the school year and she’s giving us another assignment like this, before she gave us an MLA assignment which i spent 6 hours on it typing it on the laptop. Anyways leading up to the project i was kinda nervous cause i had to speak because during highschool i had a mask on for 4 years, so it was challenging for me, I had to practice presenting in front of my mother and my aunt and i was working with my speech teacher fixing my sentences, and punctuations to make it look good. Eventually when the day of my soapbox speech happened, minutes before we would be in small groups I kept looking at my paper, underlining key parts of what to say. Later on, during the speech when it was my turn I managed to present, lowering my mask so they could hear me well. After I did my speech, this project gave me confidence. I just have to calm down and just get things over with, not that big of a deal. 

Another particular moment in my life where language and literacy played a role was getting pulled out of classes for speech, helping me communicate, improving writing, and good grammar, for elementary, middle, and high school, i would be in a small group including me of 2-4 people, we would read passages taking turns reading out loud, answering the questions together stuff like that, and i would say the speech teachers i had all 3 of the schools really benefitted me for my education to develop and improve more but in my opinion my high school speech teacher played an important role for helping me cause she did alot and other students giving organizers on how to structure an essay etc. and advantages i have in language and literacy is being able to read perfectly and not struggle with words, a disadvantage is struggling to  explain to a answer, i often answer like asking a question, for example someone asks me a math problem like what’s 6×6 and i would say it like 36? In other school subjects, but I’m trying my best to get there.