Chip

Adkins Chip
Professor Powell
English 1010
17 September 2012

Personal Essay
Over my eighteen years I have had several experiences that have developed the literacy skills that I now have. Most of the experiences were bad though, considering I’m not a big fan of writing. However there were a few good experiences that I did have in my literacy journey. There are three experiences in particular that come to mind when I think about my literacy journey. The first was the letter super heros in kindergarten, the second was the paper I had to write my junior year in high school, and last was scoring a five on my TCAP assessment test. These three things were three of the major moments in my literacy journey. The start of my literacy journey was probably in kindergarten when I learned my ABCs. To help us learn our ABCs my teacher had these blow up dolls with one letter on their chest. My teacher told us they were “super heros” telling us this to help us learn them because all little kids love a super hero. This was a very effective method my teacher had, because I remember learning my ABCs surprisingly fast. This is a great memory for me because this is where it all started for me. Without those super heros I probably never would’ve thought it was cool to work hard and learn my ABCs. The ABCs are the foundation everybody’s education making this experience for me probably the most important because I would be nowhere today if I didn’t know my ABCs.

The second experience that comes to my mind is my junior year in high school when I had to write the hardest paper I’ve ever had to write in my life. My junior year of high school was by far the hardest year of schooling I’ve ever had mainly because of my teacher Ms. Wolff. Ms. Wolff was a nice lady but a very hard and strict teacher. I struggled in her class all year but I struggled particularly in the second semester when she assigned the class a paper on the book we just read. We had three weeks to complete this paper, it seemed like a lot of time but it wasn’t at all. This paper unlike others I started early on because I knew it was a very big grade and I needed to do well on it. So I worked hard on this paper for three weeks and turned it in with high hopes and confidence. The next day in class I got my paper back and I received a sixty seven on it which immediately made me mad because I had worked so hard on it. Luckily my teacher gave us the option tom revise it and make a better grade on it. So I did revise and ended up passing it. After that paper the rest of the papers I had in high school seemed easier and I got better grades on all of my papers. My last experience I had was scoring a five on my TCAP writing assessment test. This experience was the best for me in my literacy journey. After working hard throughout my schooling career, and never really liking writing and to make a very high grade meant a lot to me. It showed me that hard work does pay off and all that work I did wasn’t for nothing. It was a very rewarding experience for me.

Over my years I’ve had several experiences in the development of literacy. The majority of my experiences were bad but there were some good ones in my journey. When I really think about the experiences I had I think about three main ones that show the development of my skills. The first was learning my ABCs with the letter super heros, the second was my paper I had to write my junior year, and the last one was scoring a five on my writing TCAP assessment. These experiences gave me the literacy skills that I have today and I’m glad I got to experience them and look forward to more experiences like them in the future.