Reflective Essay: The Role Of Culture In Shaping Us As Individuals

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The Role of Culture in Shaping us as Individuals Culture has a big impact on how we all fit in as individuals in today’s society, and since this assignment is about that I decided to include some of my own experiences to illustrate my point of view and compare it with those of my classmates and some of the readings. My family and I moved to United States in 1998 from Albania. My parents believed that I and my sister would get a better education here and also it would be useful and interesting to learn another language and its culture. Considering I didn’t speak a word of English I was very scared about starting high school. I was scared about fitting in with the other kids, I was scared about not being able to understand …show more content…

All I remember is turning red in my face and using the same phrase I had told myself many times that I was never going to use… “I don’t speak English.” When we moved here I told myself I was going to try my best however I wasn’t going to be like another one of those foreigners you see in the movies that move to a different country and make no attempt to learn the language. I also told my self that I was going to repeat every word that I heard in my brain and then later using the dictionary to find out what that word …show more content…

It’s funny, when I read “Real Indians Eat Jell-O” by Laurie Carlson it reminded me of all those times I sat in the library wondering and analyzing other people’s behaviors. I agree with the message Carlson is portraying in her essay that it is a good thing to belong to a different culture however you should always have room to grow in you. What I think she means is that each culture can be as different from one another as it can be interesting. There are a lot of good things to be picked up from it and not so many good things that should not. We, as individuals will always have our culture to reflect back on, however we are who we are and never be ashamed of that. Also, as I was reading during high school I came to create this idea of a perfect culture…everyone worked by the age of 15, most children moved out of their parent’s houses by the age of 18, and parents were not obligated to pay for their kid’s tuition fees. All that was very strange to me, since where I come from these things are never heard of. As time went by I came to realize that not all that was true. Not everyone moved out at that age, not everyone had job by the age of 15 and certainly not everyone had to pay for their tuitions on their own. As I read “Real Indians Eat Jell-o” by Laurie Carlson I thought of all those things as I compared them and found them similar to the

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