My history regarding reading and writing goes from not even knowing how to write simple sentences such as “How are you?” to being in an AP Literature class in 7 years. Starting at the age of ten, I felt like a complete outsider about reading and writing. I had just moved from Guatemala, a Spanish-speaking country, therefore I was not comfortable nor familiar with the English language. Along the way of learning how to read and write, I was fortunate to receive help from those around me. A particular memory that is still fresh in my mind is from when I first started attending 5th grade, which was two months after moving to the United States. A teacher assistant at the school would go and take me outside of the class to teach me English. I am still very thankful towards her since she was patient with me and taught me several things such as the ABCs, numbers, colors, and even helped me practice reading words.
I cannot say that learning the language from zero was an easy task since I had a lot of trouble memorizing how to pronounce certain words. I also had to constantly remind myself that English has different rules regarding reading and writing than Spanish. Even the structure of sentences is different in both languages; therefore, I had to learn everything from zero as if I had just started attending kindergarten.
After graduating elementary school and starting middle school, I received a lot of support from my teachers as they taught me more and more on how to make my writing and reading in English better. Throughout high school, it was the same as I also received lots of encouragement from my English teachers, just that this time they had more expectations from me than before. In 10th grade, my counselor enrolled me in an honors English class, then the following year, in 11th grade, I chose to take the AP Language class. In 12th grade, after many years, I finally felt like an insider to writing and reading in English. I decided to enroll in the AP Literature class even though it was intimidating, but with the help of my teacher and her compliments towards my hard work I was able to become more confident. I also felt like I fit in with the rest of the people in the class, something that I had trouble with before since I always felt like the people in my English classes were much better at the language than I was.
After further discussion with some of my peers in my English 115 class, I discovered that I am not the only one who has felt like an outsider to reading and writing before. Some of our stories are different from one another, but they have the same conclusion of how with patience and practice, we can all become insiders to those things we are not familiar with, just like Sheila Tobias explains in the text of “Insiders and Outsiders.” Also, just like Tobias pointed out, it is essential to take into consideration other people’s perspectives since one person might find a topic familiar and easy to understand, but it might not be the same for everyone else.