By Andy Xie, Staff Writer
I was lost. I was nine years old when I came to this country not knowing the customs and language. It was like being in a cloud of confusion, and I felt like I was always behind and didn’t know what was going on.
When I first came, I went to a Chinese immigrant school as a fourth grader. I felt scared and lonely because I don’t know anybody and I don’t understand English. There were people there who could speak Chinese to me, but it was tiring trying to learn another language. All of my homework is in English which made it difficult for me to understand and to finish and I had no idea but to go back and ask for help from my teacher.
In fifth grade, I went to JYC Elementary School, which was all in English, and it made me feel nervous and scared. I could speak a little, but not enough to know what the teacher was talking about when she explained things. I was also pulled out of class once a day to work on my English and I had to miss what the other students were learning. I felt I was behind other students and I couldn’t catch up with them. In my mind I thought that I wasn’t as smart as other students.
In middle school, I felt like I was catching up with the other students, but I realized I was actually still behind. l I had an ELD class once a day, and I thought this was a class that everyone had to take, but I was wrong, it was only for the students who were English learners. This added to made me feel dumb because most of my other friends didn’t have to take the class. In addition, the other classes were still difficult, especially English and my grades were poor.
In 7th grade though, things started to change because I started the Home Away tutoring program four days a week after school so my grades got a lot better. In 8th grade I didn’t feel like I needed ELD classes anymore because I thought that ELD was easy and I just fooled around in the class.
In High School I didn’t take ELD classes and I was happy about it, but I still didn’t know a lot of vocabulary, and wasn’t familiar with parts of American culture. But with help from my tutors, I started getting decent grades. As of now, I am still learning English but I have a much better understanding of it. Now I feel like English is not a big problem to me anymore because I understand it and enough to help my family out and I felt like from 4th grade to 11th grade I can learn that much English. It makes me impressed, but I think I could still improve on it more.
Because I am the only English speaker in the house I have certain responsibilities within my family. I want to help them as much as I can. If there is an emergency then I have to be there to translate. I have to translate letters and phone calls and have to go to parent-teacher conferences. At home I speak Chinese to my sister and brother. My sister is learning English from her second grade class in school, Tik Tok, and YouTube. My one and a half year old brother is learning nursery rhymes on Cocomelon.
Now that the technology is very advanced my sister and brother can learn English easier, and faster. It also saves me a lot of time because the tech can teach them instead of me. I needed help because I didn’t have a good start as my sister and brother did.
Now I have two languages and I can speak, read, and write in both English and Chinese. Now I am ahead of some others, because I am familiar with two worlds and two languages. This might help me in the future in my business life and social life. I don’t feel lost anymore.
