Literacy Narrative: English Is Not My First Language
W1T Literacy Narrative Draft 1
English is not my first language. In fact, I didn’t learn it well enough to have a conversation until I was about 10 years old. I remember the embarrassment of being new to a country I called home after living in Mexico for years. Things changed quickly the first day of 8th grade. I remember being energetically greeted by a slender athletic man in his fifties in a muggy summer morning. The hum of the air conditioning as welcome sound as we found our seats in this room that smelled of being closed the last few months. His name was Mr. Goodman and he was, by most accounts, an “asshole.” This was a descriptor of which he was proud. Even the other faculty thought so. He was a strange man, but he had his reasons. Surprisingly, he was also one of the best teacher’s I’ve encountered to this day. He had a brutally visceral way of making you care about learning. His class would soon change the way I spoke English for the rest of my life.
Towards the end of the first month …show more content…
I’d remained kind of shy and quiet in that class. I sat next to my friends, Mike and Seth. On this particular day I we were talking rather loud and felt a little too confident with our BS skill. He was giving a lecture about how from the first moments he meets someone we make assumptions about them based on their posture, demeanor and language skills. “The way we carry ourselves and speak will many times do more for us or against us than many other things we concern ourselves with.” Mr. Goodman said. He suggested we discuss the meaning of what he said with our neighbors but at that moment our adolescent jokes got too loud and we exhausted his patience. Then, in one of those awful moments when the room gets quiet just as you’re about to say something stupid the room was frozen silent.
“No fucking way!” I exclaimed with my heavy Mexican accent into the quiet room, instantly aware of my mistake. At the time I was still learning all the ways to swear in English and I almost had a fascination with over using them as often as possible. At that moment Mr. Goodman redirected his attention on us. ”Would you like to share with the class what’s so unbelievable?”
Without missing a beat my friend Mike blurted “I’m sorry Mr. Goodman. I’m just so poor I can’t pay attention.” Then with an unmatched skill for retort, Mr. Goodman replied “We’ll that makes sense since your mom got married for the rice.”
My jaw dropped jaws dropped. Mike’s jaw dropped. Then I looked around and realize everyone was staring in disbelief at what they just witnessed. Breaking the silence, Mr. Goodman asked me “What’s your excuse? You already at a disadvantage with that accent. Do you want to learn or would you prefer to joke your way through life into working at Burger King in our thirties?”
That sentence alone changed my life.
The days following that day all I could think was “Who did he think we was to talk to someone he didn’t know like that. To tell me I’d end up working there just like that. Over time however I began to grasp English concepts better and better. Conversational grammar became a fascination. Pretty soon I was getting really good at telling stories in English as I could in Spanish at the time, but there was still something wrong. It wasn’t the order of my words but their sound.
The more I focused on my accent, the more I hated the way it sounded. Deep down in me I hoped I could train my accent away. For months I would watch movies and national geographic documentaries to mimic the accents of the actors and narrators. My parents thought it was a little strange but didn’t seem too worried. Soon I was getting better and it became fun to learn the rules that distinguish accents and pretty soon I was learning to mimic a few others besides
English.
Then, in 10th grade, it happened. I was talking to a classmate and I told him I lived Mexico for years. His next question was “So who taught you English when you lived there?” he couldn’t believe English was a fairly new language to me. That was the moment I had worked towards for countless hours and my wish had finally materialized. It’s interesting how different life seems when you aren’t instantly identified as different than one because of the way you sound and at the same times. Whether for good reasons or misguided teen angst, I was happy I now had a better control over an ability we take for granted, the power of our voice. It’s difficult and frustrating to try to get your point across when people focus on how you say things instead of what you say. It’s kind of crazy, thinking back on it now, I owe this ability to a strange middle aged jerk who enjoyed picking on terrible students in his classes until some of them learned to care about themselves.
English is not my first language. In fact, I didn’t learn it well enough to have a conversation until I was about 10 years old. I remember the embarrassment of being new to a country I called home after living in Mexico for years. Things changed quickly the first day of 8th grade. I remember being energetically greeted by a slender athletic man in his fifties in a muggy summer morning. The hum of the air conditioning as welcome sound as we found our seats in this room that smelled of being closed the last few months. His name was Mr. Goodman and he was, by most accounts, an “asshole.” This was a descriptor of which he was proud. Even the other faculty thought so. He was a strange man, but he had his reasons. Surprisingly, he was also one of the best teacher’s I’ve encountered to this day. He had a brutally visceral way of making you care about learning. His class would soon change the way I spoke English for the rest of my life.
Towards the end of the first month …show more content…
I’d remained kind of shy and quiet in that class. I sat next to my friends, Mike and Seth. On this particular day I we were talking rather loud and felt a little too confident with our BS skill. He was giving a lecture about how from the first moments he meets someone we make assumptions about them based on their posture, demeanor and language skills. “The way we carry ourselves and speak will many times do more for us or against us than many other things we concern ourselves with.” Mr. Goodman said. He suggested we discuss the meaning of what he said with our neighbors but at that moment our adolescent jokes got too loud and we exhausted his patience. Then, in one of those awful moments when the room gets quiet just as you’re about to say something stupid the room was frozen silent.
“No fucking way!” I exclaimed with my heavy Mexican accent into the quiet room, instantly aware of my mistake. At the time I was still learning all the ways to swear in English and I almost had a fascination with over using them as often as possible. At that moment Mr. Goodman redirected his attention on us. ”Would you like to share with the class what’s so unbelievable?”
Without missing a beat my friend Mike blurted “I’m sorry Mr. Goodman. I’m just so poor I can’t pay attention.” Then with an unmatched skill for retort, Mr. Goodman replied “We’ll that makes sense since your mom got married for the rice.”
My jaw dropped jaws dropped. Mike’s jaw dropped. Then I looked around and realize everyone was staring in disbelief at what they just witnessed. Breaking the silence, Mr. Goodman asked me “What’s your excuse? You already at a disadvantage with that accent. Do you want to learn or would you prefer to joke your way through life into working at Burger King in our thirties?”
That sentence alone changed my life.
The days following that day all I could think was “Who did he think we was to talk to someone he didn’t know like that. To tell me I’d end up working there just like that. Over time however I began to grasp English concepts better and better. Conversational grammar became a fascination. Pretty soon I was getting really good at telling stories in English as I could in Spanish at the time, but there was still something wrong. It wasn’t the order of my words but their sound.
The more I focused on my accent, the more I hated the way it sounded. Deep down in me I hoped I could train my accent away. For months I would watch movies and national geographic documentaries to mimic the accents of the actors and narrators. My parents thought it was a little strange but didn’t seem too worried. Soon I was getting better and it became fun to learn the rules that distinguish accents and pretty soon I was learning to mimic a few others besides
English.
Then, in 10th grade, it happened. I was talking to a classmate and I told him I lived Mexico for years. His next question was “So who taught you English when you lived there?” he couldn’t believe English was a fairly new language to me. That was the moment I had worked towards for countless hours and my wish had finally materialized. It’s interesting how different life seems when you aren’t instantly identified as different than one because of the way you sound and at the same times. Whether for good reasons or misguided teen angst, I was happy I now had a better control over an ability we take for granted, the power of our voice. It’s difficult and frustrating to try to get your point across when people focus on how you say things instead of what you say. It’s kind of crazy, thinking back on it now, I owe this ability to a strange middle aged jerk who enjoyed picking on terrible students in his classes until some of them learned to care about themselves.