Category: Student Posts

It was in the 4th grade when I first came to America from Ethiopia.I attended a predominantly white school with a majority of ignorant kids who questioned if I could speak English or not. Being one of the only students to not speak, read, or write in English was very intimidating. I hated the idea of bringing any more attention to myself because I already stood out by being one of the five students who were of color. I used to sit in class wondering about how great America would be, the education I would receive, all the new friends I would make, and so on. All the time I spent fantasizing about my future home was crushed when I stepped into a classroom where I couldn’t find any other kids who resembled me. My teacher, Ms.Nelson, constantly pressured me to speak aloud to the entire class, solely for her amusement in hearing my distinct accent .She would use me as an example to teach the kids that if that didn’t practice they would eventually become like me. Consequently, from that day forward until my time in middle school, I refrained from acquiring skills in reading, writing, and speaking English within an educational setting.

 However, I never stopped practicing outside of school. My love of writing never faded away completely; I just avoided practicing in class to avoid being bullied. I spent countless hours practicing reading and writing until I felt I had mastered it. I used writing as a way to express myself easily because I found it hard to speak in English. I practiced every day until 6th grade and that’s when I felt comfortable enough to start getting out of my shell. I even started to sign up for writing and poem competitions. Despite the fact that I never fully committed to the competitions because of fear, little Kidist would have been pleased  for having the bravery to sign up. However, the process of learning to read was very challenging due to my lack of knowledge of the alphabet, grammatical conventions, and vocabulary. It wasn’t until middle school when I started to learn more about grammar, sentence structure, and so on. Regardless of this development, procuring resources like books, computers, notebooks – vital tools for practice – remained a challenge for me. I constantly found myself at the library watching random “How to pronounce English words” youtube videos and repeatedly reading one of my favorite children’s books, The Very Busy Spider.

 Yet, when I began high school I started to lose my passion for writing. With the gradual disappearance of my heavy Ethiopian accent and the nurturing companionship of understanding peers,I felt more at ease in my social group. It eventually caused me to abandon the craft that had formerly provided me great joy.  Although this was when I gained proficiency with the language and felt confident, I stopped using writing as an escape. I began viewing writing as a chore rather than a way to express myself. Trying to balance school work, writing supplements, and my personal statement, I was tired of writing.I discontinued journaling because it began feeling like an assignment rather than something I could do to destress or for my pleasure. I was constantly hitting the burnout stage and having to force myself to write and write just to complete the assignment. Often feeling discouraged, I began to stop writing for fun and only when necessary for school. 

Even to this day ,the true stance of my relationship with writing and reading is uncertain. I’ve overcome this big obstacle that hindered me from learning, but does it necessarily mean that I have to enjoy writing and reading because I finally understand how to? As future semesters unfold in my college years, I anticipate my journey with writing and reading to grow as it is an essential part of being a student. While I’m unsure of how my growth will change my opinion of reading and writing, I hope I gradually regain that passion I once had in middle school. 

Mixtape

This is a mixtape where songs include the lyric “sorry.” As I was first diving into this assignment, I couldn’t think of a rhetorical situation my mixtape so I followed one of the examples of findings songs that include a word. I thought using one word like “sorry” would be too easy so I added an additional rule of songs that I’ve heard before.

My album cover inspiration comes from my dorm room. Many of the songs I listened to were about apologizing to someone and I thought gambling, or poker chips could represent the regret that people had.

Link to Literacy Narrative Pt. 3

The literacy narrative project has encouraged me to think critically about my personal experiences and how to convey them effectively through different mediums. I was better able to meet the Writing as a Process learning outcome because the literacy narrative was split into three parts. After writing my first draft, converting it into a comic helped me visualize exactly what I was trying to express and understand which parts of my essay were unnecessary. That way, when it came time to turn it back into an alphabetic narrative, I knew what revisions and edits needed to be added to make my essay more cohesive. Rearranging my writing into the comic medium also helped me meet the Visual Thinking learning outcome. The visual format of the project meant I was required to experiment with different ways of arranging my narrative so it would convey the ideas outlined in my first draft.
Returning to the alphabetic literacy narrative, I understood that several portions of my writing needed to be re-written, especially towards the end. I didn’t feel a need to change much from the first half of my essay, where I described reading and writing from childhood to middle school, but the comic gave me insight into the significance of those events. I realized instead of focusing on re-reading or returning to the enthusiasm for reading I once had as a kid, the true importance of being in my junior year English class was that it allowed me to reflect on my mentality towards reading and writing. That’s how I came to see my story in a different way; I understood how to get to the heart of how the evolution of my attitude has shaped the way I read and write.

This literacy narrative project has been different from any other writing assignment I have had in english classes, due to the fact that I have never had to write a comic before. Writing alphabetically and in comic form with the same storyline proved to be challenging but fun. Having the ability to see other students’ work was also extremely helpful for my learning in the writing process. I liked how we started off writing alphabetically because that was what I was most familiar with. Turning the alphabetic style into a comic was the most difficult part for me because I struggled to fit the entirety of my alphabetic narrative into the comic effectively. When I transformed the alphabetic narrative into a comic, I realized how choppy my narrative was. Seeing the narrative in visual form allowed me to realize and acknowledge what changes I needed to make to my narrative to make it more cohesive. My comic was more like a photo collage than a comic, so I made an active effort to make my alphabetic version more story-like. I was glad that the third part of the process was to go back to the alphabetic and make revisions. Critiquing each other’s storyboard was an interactive way to learn throughout the process, as well as having access to everyone’s website and being able to see each other’s work. Along with never creating a comic before this class, I had never made my own website before. This class and this project has helped me learn how to create and utilize my own website, which will most definitely be extremely helpful in the future. After going through all three stages of the process, I see my narrative differently than I did before. Originally I was attempting to tell the story from the beginning of my life up to this current point in time. After going back, however, I connected the end of my narrative to the beginning in order to have more synthesis and conclusion.

If you flip through my elementary school yearbook, there is a series of pages with photos of each fifth grade graduate lined up in neat boxes. Under the photos, there are a few fun facts about each student; one being what they want to be when they grow up. While most of my peers aspired to be an astronaut or a lawyer, I had a different passion that I pursued throughout elementary school. When you land on my box, you will find an eleven year old girl in a bright purple sweater with the caption: “I want to be an author when I grow up”. 

On one of the first Christmases I can remember, I recall tearing open a gift from Santa to find a “make your own book” kit. Little did I know that this very kit would be the catalyst for my aspirations to be an author. The kit contained sheets of paper and markers to write and illustrate a story. That very day, I wrote and illustrated my first book: “Family Trip to the Zoo”. The story describes a family of four taking a trip to the zoo, the main character being my aunt Keara. I submitted the writing and illustrations, and in a few short weeks I received a hardcover version of my story. Over the course of my elementary school years, I wrote and illustrated a total of five books; which you can still find tucked in my bookshelf at home. My aunt holds the title of favorite relative, and I devoted four out of five of my stories to her – one being more centrally focused on her daughter. Aunt Keara has her own copies of each book, and would encourage me to write a sequel after receiving each new story.

As the years passed through middle school and into high school, my books collected dust on my shelf. My passion for reading and writing slowly faded into the background, as school and basketball took hold of my focus. It wasn’t until my first heartbreak that sparked up my passion for writing once again. My first break-up occurring in my junior year of high school snuck up behind me and knocked me out. In the midst of the messy ending, I sobbed for weeks on end; physically unable to eat, sleep, or function. I desperately needed closure, which he was unwilling to provide. I sent him paragraph after paragraph, with no response in return. I realized my desperation was only pushing him further away, and that I needed to find closure on my own. In a moment of hopelessness, I resorted to journaling. Every time I wanted to text, call, or reach out, I would write everything I wanted to say to him in my journal. Flipping through my journal entries is the epitome of an emotional rollercoaster. One entry will be beautifully written, reminiscing on how “perfect” our relationship was and how I would do just about anything to get him back, while the next entry would be written in all capital letters about how horrible he treated me and made me feel. No matter how tempted I was to send him these entries, I held my ground and kept them to myself. The more I wrote, the better I felt. Eventually, I no longer depended on my journal or felt suffocated by the urge to reach out. We broke up at the beginning of May of my junior year, and my last entry was July 21st. The irony of it all is that a few months later, he reached out to me begging for me back and apologizing for everything he put me through. Unfortunately for him, by then I had moved on and soon after met someone new. Healing is a process, and without utilizing writing as an outlet, I am unsure as to whether or not I would have made it through.

Starting that very summer (the summer of my breakup), my mom hired me to tutor my younger brothers in English. She paid me twenty dollars an hour and posed the tutoring sessions as distractions from my emotional distress. While I grew up with a natural passion for reading and writing, my brothers struggled with finding the same motivation. I created lesson plans consisting of basic reading comprehension, grammar, and writing. Conducting these lessons contorted my vision as a writer, due to the fact that I had the lens of an instructor rather than a student. Creating the lesson plans and teaching my brothers led me to plunge further into the details of the language, and fine tune my own writing in the process. I used samples from my own writing in the lessons, which proved to be beneficial for both my brothers and me. The process gave me awareness of the hidden errors in my writing: teaching grammar resulted in a closer analysis of my own. While my tutoring days are over, I learned a lot from taking the role of teacher and improved my writing as a result. 

If someone were to now ask me “what do you want to be when you grow up?”, I would most definitely have a different answer than my fifth grade self. My answer today would probably be a PA (physician’s assistant), but who knows what the answer will be a year from now. Regardless of what my final decision will be, I am almost certain that writing will be a key aspect of any job I wish to pursue. The ability to communicate, whether it is through writing, speaking, or through visuals, is a universal necessity. My growth in writing throughout adolescence, while it may appear to be insignificant, will prove to be important in the grand scheme of life. 

All of the literacy narratives have helped me develop my writing as a process and think critically as I jot down my ideas for my essay and comic. The first version of my literacy narrative challenged my skills in drafting and editing. I had to plan out what I wanted to include in my narrative and turn my ideas into words. For the comic, it required my ability to translate my ideas using another form of presentation. Lastly, this literacy narrative practiced my ability to revise and reflect on my past work.
After creating my comic, I was able to identify the most crucial parts of my story that shaped my writing. Since the comic is much shorter and has more restrictions compared to essays, I left out parts of the first narrative in the comic. This allowed me to check whether these parts of my essay were expressed clearly or if enough detail was included. For example, I focused all of my revisions on the conclusion of my original narrative. I realized that I left out a lot of reasoning and insight at the end of my narrative, and the comic was what helped me to identify this gap.
Now, I see my story emphasizing the most on my academic experience. My writing has changed because of the needs in different classes; it has never been because of myself. This has led me to realize that I should try to write with my own style without the restriction of others. In terms of the narrative, I tried to develop more on the most important part of the story—how both informal and formal writing shaped my writing now.

Oftentimes when I write I feel that their is a disconnect between the words I write and my subconscious thoughts. However, the literacy narrative process- writing the first draft, translating it into a comic, and then translating the comic back into an essay format- allowed me to better understand my subconscious thoughts to ensure that the final essay conveyed the narrative I intended. Additionally, I learned new strategies that I would use in writing future essays like creating a small visual to better outline what I want to cover within my essay. 

The narrative process included many setbacks. One was finding the medium that I was going to visualize the comic with. After multiple attempts of trying to draw the comic and failing, I decided that I had to take a leap of faith and trust my creativity in a new medium. I did this by using Canva images as the main medium for my graphic novels completed by hand-drawn images to further the rhetorical strategies I wanted to implement. After creating the comic, the writing process was a lot smoother than I expected. I felt that the visual medium forced me to focus on the main arguments I was trying to claim which in turn allowed for me to have a better structured essay with more relevant details to enhance the story. When looking at the difference between the first draft of the essay compared to the final copy, my final copy has a much clearer direction throughout the essay explaining the complicated relationship I had with the english language and how I finally found that natural interest in it that I always wanted.

https://music.apple.com/us/playlist/lost-dog/pl.u-AkAmvxyTle5e0XA

Since I was 11 I have been playing in concerts and music competitions. When I was in high school I was part of a vocal jazz group that won the largest High School Jazz festivals in the country for 9 straight years. Last summer I started playing, as a solo act, paid gigs for restaurants, private parties, and weddings, and got offered to play on a cruise line. While all of this may sound impressive I found that my love for music dwindled when the start of performing was mixed with the pressure to succeed and live up to either the money that was promised or the judges who would give review and criticize. This year I have been burnt out musically and am taking the semester off from voice lessons. With new-found time, I started my own band here at Emory. While we don’t have a name yet we have enjoyed practicing together and have some gigs in the pipeline for Spring 2024.

The reason the playlist is so long is because I took the time to put together a playlist that covers most of my musical tastes combined with songs that are feasible to perform in a live setting. I have already played live for money 75% of the songs on the mix tape and am working on the other 25%. I enjoyed making this playlist as it let me reflect on my time performing and reminded me why I love to play live. I remember each song I have played, so going through the mix tape filled me with nostalgia.

One music taste that was severely left off of the playlist and should be noted was Jazz. As I said earlier my background with Vocal Jazz as a genre is extensive and I even wrote a personal statement in High School about Titled “The Jazz Thinker,” a play on the “The Jazz Singer.”

This is my mix tape cover. It is a graphic I used for a live performance last year. The BayWalkers is the name of my family band. My older brother pictured above plays bass and my twin brother plays drums. We do not have a current guitar player but use a different one for different gigs.