Literacy Challenges in Cultural Assimilation

Yeraldim Ruiz

English 103

TR 3pm

January 29,2014

Literacy Narrative

The Struggles of Assimilating

From a very young age my family never really enforced reading on me and my siblings. When I started school it was every difficult to understand what to do because English was not my first language, and I also had started school four months late. Everyone in my class already knew the alphabet, there numbers, and also how to spell their own name. I was the only one that didn’t know how to do any of that. My teacher would get mad at me for not learning it quickly enough to be at the same pace as the other children. My teacher began to grow more and more impatient with me and I became very scared. When it came time to do my homework I would

cry then my mom would cry with me because it was difficult and didn't know how to do it. I slowly began to learn and I eventually did get caught up to the others. It was difficult because I didn’t have anyone to help me; my parents didn’t speak English and I was the eldest,so I had no older siblings to help me out. I was basically on my own. this typically happens to other hispanic children that are first generation in the United States. They don't have anyone to guide then or help them instead they are scolded and looked down upon by their teachers. We hispanic children learning english as a second language are just expected to not learn.
Being treated like this made me feel that I would never master the english language. In many cases these educators are wrong we as students have a difficult time learning not because our interference of our first language but by the fact that we are discouraged by the educators that should be encouraging us. Encouragement is the key to the success to many students, for a long time I thought I was a horrible writer once I was in high school it turn out to be a whole different scenario. Throughout our educational lives we are made to take test such as CELDT test which test our english and see if we are that the level of other english dominant students.(Gutiérrez & Vanderwood 7)
When I began high school I didn’t expect to be placed into the classes I did because I thought I was going to get placed into only two honors classes, math and science which were my best subjects.

To my surprise I was placed into honors English and I didn’t understand why I was placed into this class if I knew English was my worst subject. The difficulty arose when we began to read. This was a whole other level of what I was use to reading. Through all my elementary and middle school education, they didn’t really enforce reading on us. The most they would to to make us read was that they set aside thirty minutes out of the week to read and thats it. When we had to read Romeo and Juliet it was very hard to understand even though we would stop and discuss what was going on throughout the story. When I finished reading I only had the general overview of what the story was about; I didn’t know in depth what it was that really happened. Then the worst part came we had to write an analytical essay about one of the characters from the book and explain their role in the story. Besides not being able to completely understand the story, we didn’t even get to choose our own character. It was all done at random. I got stuck with a character called Benvolio, but I had no idea of who he was, much less where in the story he was

located.
Once I got down to writing the paper, it was very difficult trying to find out if he was a friend or foe to either the Capulets or the Montagues . When I found we where he was located I read and reread his part in the play and I still didn’t understand. Then I wrote my paper it was the worst thing I had ever write in my life because when you write a bad paper you get a bad grade. I felt discourage at the very beginning of my high school career. After receiving the bad grade my teacher asked me didn’t I use other resources to help me understand the play such as spark notes? Being a freshman I didn’t even know that it existed. I didn’t want to rely on an easier read to understand what is going on in the story. My teacher let me rewrite the paper for a much better grade.
My best year in writing was my senior year in high school when I had to do a research paper on a topic we thought was very controversial and taboo to my generation.

I took on the topic of sweatshops. I was very passionate about this topic and I believe it some of the best writing I had ever done. Before I began to write I did a survey in all of my class which were all high school senior only fifteen percent actually knew what types of rights workers are entitled, this survey was also done to the high school freshman and only five percent knew what workers are entitled too. I was astonished on how little information I could get out of this topic even through the internet. I could also not believe that workers’ rights were not just violated overseas but also in our own home of California, to be specific in the Los Angeles fashion district. If you were to walk in the fashion district and if you were to look up you would see people hard at work trying to make ends meet in unsanitary inhumane working conditions, while the government does nothing because cheap labor is good for the

economy.
When I presented this to my English class they couldn’t believe what these type of things were occurring around the world, also basically in their own home and had not heard a thing about it. When my peer read my paper they were amazed on how so many well-known brand named products are made in sweatshops Nike being one of the major brands that does this. This paper besides being the best that I believe I had ever written also made me want to join and stand up for workers’ rights. I am glad that I got my peers attention and made them realize something that they had never even heard of before that was right in there faces. What made me happy is that many of my peers did want to stand up and make a change and try to make this stop.
Works Cited

Gutiérrez, Gabriel, and Mike L. Vanderwood. "A Growth Curve Analysis Of Literacy Performance Among Second-Grade, Spanish-Speaking, English-Language Learners." School Psychology Review 42.1 (2013): 3-21. Academic Search Premier. Web. 4 Feb. 2014.