Advanced Essay #2: Mom's English

Introduction:

​When I started to write this paper, all I knew about it was that I wanted to write about my mom. Basically, I just rambled until I ended up with something I could work with. I'm proud of the quote that I used because it really encompasses the way I feel my mom's way of speaking and just literacy in general. I'm pretty proud of the essay overall, but if I were to edit it more, I would definitely elaborate on some of the ideas brought up and possibly add another scene.

When we were first being taught to read in kindergarten, my whole class was sitting on the carpet in the back of the room, while my teacher wrote simple words on the board for us to sound out. She asked a student to read the word “Dad”.

“Duh-ah-duh” The kid stuttered through the word. I was sitting somewhere in the middle of the group with a weird mix of extreme apathy and anxiety. On one hand, I really didn’t want to be picked to read, but on the other hand, I was bored and just wanted us to be finished so we could move on to the music lesson. I could tell that my classmates felt the same because many of them were either talking to each other or staring into space.

“Katie, how about you read this for us?” My head snapped up and my heart dropped to my toes. I saw a second word on the board, “Cat”. Of course I knew how to read it, easy. I sounded it out in my head, Cuh-ah-tuh.

“Come on,” she encouraged, “you can do it.” But I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud. The only thing I could think of was the worry of sounding stupid and my classmates laughing at me

This moment is the earliest memory I have of being nervous about reading. It was the first real time I had the chance to be criticized by other people. I had no issue with understanding what the word said. There have been multiple instances where people denoted my intelligence to luck, but that is not at all the case. I’m not lucky. I have worked my entire life to be able to function academically, at the level I do. I credit this entirely to my mom. She made sure that I knew how to read long before kindergarten. My mom has a lot of trouble with English, despite it being her first, and only, language. When it comes to literacy, she’s aware of her shortcomings and she never wanted me to struggle, whether in school or in life, as much as she did. This is why she made sure that I had the knowledge and competence to be confident in my intelligence. Even though I knew I could read and write extremely well for my age, my mom’s uncertainties stuck to me, they made me uncomfortable with reading and speaking.

My mom speaks a different version of English, words are swapped for each other, sentences are mixed around and rearranged, and she doesn’t do it on purpose. We have conversations that would be hard to follow for some people and, much like in Mother Tongue by Amy Tan, it would be considered ‘broken’ English. Tan summarizes the conflict with naming it really well, writing, “It has always bothered me that I can think of no other way to describe it than ‘broken’ as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness.” I’ve always seen my mom struggle and she has always taught me that I need to work hard, I have to work harder than hard, to succeed in life. She motivated me to be intense with my education and to reach out for more opportunities to learn and to get ahead.

As a child, I was relatively aware; I knew we had issues with money, for example, and it’s these issues in particular that push me to be successful in school and, furthermore, in life. My goal is to get to a place where I can support my mom. She has succeeded in supporting me by threads for my entire life, I want to be able to support her with steel beams for the rest of hers.

Language has a major influence on a person’s identity. It has the ability to connect people while also being able to eradicate others; it’s the kind of thing that’s bittersweet. Looking at the effect of language on how people are viewed by society reveals just how important it is. People who speak properly are seen as more intelligent when this is not at all true. Often times, people meet students who don’t speak the standard of a language and they write them off as stupid, they expect them to be less able than their peers. Those expectations push them down and don’t give them the chance to show that they are smart. I was fortunate enough to have someone who made sure that I could avoid those low expectations. My mom’s skill and confidence in literacy affected me in the past, and it still does in a lot of ways. One side of it is that seeing her struggle motivated me. It instilled a determination in me that could never die, it’s the type of motivation that starts as a child and becomes a driving force in life.  The other side shows how her low confidence stuck to me and, sometimes, hindered me. It made me nervous when it came to public speaking and sharing me language with others. Overall, my mom has taught me more than anybody has and I am forever grateful for the lessons she gave.