My Long Journey To Literacy

Throughout out my life I have been through many struggles throughout my literacy journey. I was born in the Fiji islands and the school there wasn’t as challenging as the ones in the United States. I moved to the US when I was in third grade and writing and reading was difficult, reading was my biggest challenge because I found it hard to comprehend the books that I was assigned to read. The books I reading were not interesting to me and I found myself staring at pages and texts hours at a time and would not know or understand what I read and would usually get distracted easily reading. Writing was another challenge because my vocabulary was very poor.

I moved to Vidalia Georgia when I was in third grade, It was very difficult moving because nothing seemed familiar. I went from an island that wasn’t very advanced with technology to a place that was. It was hard to adjust to the school because the workload was more challenging such as I wasn’t used to write any essays or do a presentation, It was nothing like what I was used to, I would fail my reading tests on books because it was difficult for me to pay attention.

Writing is very frustrating to me, many times I struggle writing about anything. One of the main reasons why I have so much trouble when writing, is because I don't concentrate on my work enough. Even when I try to concentrate and not look at distractions, my mind seems to wander around to a different direction towards other thoughts. After that, I forget all about what i was doing or reading, my work and just think about various things such as what am I going to do later and different things I've done in the past. For example, even while I'm writing something like this paragraph, I can’t focus and my mind wonders somewhere else. I don’t know if I’m the only one who has this problem or it happens to lots of people, but this is one problem that I have trouble the most in. I feel like this is why I'm not as good of a writer as i want to be and don't like to write. When I write, I am usually in my room sitting right where my computer is on my bed .One thing about me is that I hate writing anything with a pencil or paper. Most of the time when writing an essay, paper, or anything else, I type it on my computer. When writing, I can write no matter how loud or quiet it is no matter if it’s during the night, during the day, and during whatever atmosphere I'm in. No matter what I always usually listen to music while I’m typing an essay. However, the best time and the best place for me to write anything would be during late at night when everything is pretty quiet around me.

Another important thing to me when writing, is that I cannot have anything close to me that will distract me such as my TV because i will be tempted to turn it on. Throughout the past few years I have been slowly getting better with reading not as much with writing but I am working on it. In the article Superman and Me Sherman Alexie says ‘A smart Indian is a dangerous person, widely feared and ridiculed by Indians and non-Indians alike”. This quote stood out to me because I relate to it because the culture he was born into Alexie is looked at society as being incapable of things regular Americans can naturally do.