Literacy Challenges in Cultural Assimilation

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Recommended: The effects of early childhood education abstract

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 …show more content…

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 …show more content…

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

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