Intro

I had always been interested in words themselves as a young child mainly because I was so facinated by the fact that there was a plethora of words to choose from to describe something. That something could be how: I felt, to paint a picture with words, or to use them in certain scenarios to try to sound smarter. Half the time I would, and still use them without knowing what they mean, and to my own philosophy, I think that if I use them more then I'd remember them! I was also always such a stickler for grammar, which has created my dismal sense of heartbrokenness whenever I see misspelled words, comma splices, and incorrectly used punctuation marks, and it's much worse when I do that myself. What bothered me, yet encouraged me the most, was that I was placed in an ELD program in second grade because of the color of my skin and last name. The English Learning Development program was meant to better my English, but in reality it was just a bunch of extra work that my six year old brother could handle. It consisted of basic sentence structure development that felt redundant because it wasn't like I was born in Mexico, or some other foreign country because I wasn't! I was born in Los Angeles, CA where English was my first language. As a matter of fact I'm not even fluent in Spanish despite my ethnicity, and both of my Spanish speaking parents and older brother. During class, at monthly intervals, a woman whose name I forgot would appear with a call slip to my name, and a folder filled with activities fit for a kindergartner. She had somewhat of an accent which only made it that much more difficult for my virgin ears to handle as I had never really been exposed to such accents before. I felt a sense of minority because I thought that it was forced upon me to use this in order to excel.  I don't know why I thought that, but as far as I knew, I saw that it was only me and another friend of mine who had to take the program. This persisted all the way until the second semester of the sixth grade, and that would've stayed the same if I hadn't maintained the 3.8 grade average.