abstract
This literacy narrative is an essay that reflects on reading, writing, and language experiences that shapes a part of who I am today, with acknowledgement of its social significance.
Never give up
My high school was established on the British style of teaching, therefore it didn’t offer classes on any American based tests, like SAT’s, AP’s or anything alike, rather we did exams like IGCSE’s and A levels. Growing up in Nigeria, I always knew I would go to America for college, so my parents signed me up for an SAT course.
The SAT course was situated in a small building quite close to my house. As I stepped in the building for the first time, I felt unsettled. The building was more like an old-fashioned working office; gloomy front desk area, condemned chairs and an overall stench of hard work and despair. The receptionist was a kind faced lady, who looked like she was in her late twenties. She seemed very approachable, so I asked her for the directions to my class. She had a strong Yoruba (a Nigerian tribe) accent, for that reason I didn’t understand everything she said but I got the general gist of it. As I got to class, I was greeted by everyone and took my seat with the rest of the class. Because it was the first day, we didn’t do any learning, instead we took a prerequisite review to see how much we know from the SAT’s and what to work on. The prerequisite review had the same settings as the SAT in terms of timing, breaks and grading and our grades were given to us immediately after the test. When I saw my tests results, I was so demoralized. Although it was just a review, I couldn’t help but notice how egregious my score was, especially in the reading section. I wasn’t surprised because even during the test the reading section seemed unnecessarily hard and the passages were so esoteric for me. I didn’t bother too much about it, as it was just my first attempt.
On the second day we did some learning and finally got to meet our teachers. There were two teachers, one for math and one for English. My math teacher was a tall, thin, dark skinned man, who looked like he was in his early thirties, while my English teacher was a short, light skinned man probably in his late forties and had lived in the United States for majority of his life. Both were very nice men with a great sense of humor. They made the classes stress free and enjoyable. After a few weeks passed, we started doing weekly SAT practice tests from authors like Barrons, Kaplan, Princeton review and obviously the college board—as they were the test makers. Each test was also done in the standard SAT timing and format, in order for us to get used to it.
As time went on, we did more tests and my score kept improving, later I realized that my overall grade only improved because of my math score, my English score had little to no improvement all. I would often meet with my teacher for explanations and review the questions I got wrong, but it didn’t make a huge difference in my English score. On the day of the exam I didn’t feel very prepared for English, but I took the test anyway, and when I got my grade, as expected, I didn’t do well on the English section. This result made me very depressed and I strongly doubted my ability to comprehend written passages. My parents then got me a private teacher to help me learn better, as they thought I failed because I didn’t like the school environment. Meanwhile this was not the case at all, but I let them believe so.
My parents got a private teacher from the same organization that offered the SAT course I attended. The private teacher was a middle-aged dark woman with a high-pitched voice and a stern face. She was strict, but not too strict. She would often give me an excessive amount of work to do each day, and even during the night I would be doing the myriad homework assignments that she gave me. With this large amount of work, I found myself getting used to the questions and having better scores, although I wasn’t on my goal score yet. My private teacher would also give in depth explanations as to why I got certain questions wrong which also helped a lot. We continued this method for a month until it was time for the test day. On the test day I was quite scared and nervous, but I was more confident for this one than I was for the last. Two weeks after the test, my score was released, and I was baffled. My English score only improved by 10 points, this made me extremely disappointed, as I thought all my hard work was in vain. I was so disappointed that I started to cry for hours, mainly because I didn’t want to retake the exam for the third time. I knew that a lot of colleges would accept my overall score because the math score was pretty good, but I felt that I could do way better in the English section and that score did not show my full potential.
Later on, I decided to take the test again but I told my parents that I wanted to self-study. My past failures galvanized me to work even harder. A lot of people made fun of me for taking it a third time, which made it hard, but I tried not to care. During the course of my self-study, I started to watch a lot of videos on khan academy concerning how to read passages and answer questions effectively. They gave me tips that helped a lot, like, “scheme through the questions first”, “have an answer in mind before looking at the options”, “know the purpose of every paragraph”, “eliminate the wrong answers first” and many more other tips. I also read tips on prep scholar blog and they said that pretending to be fascinated in the topics of the passages could also better one’s understanding of the topic, as psychology has proven that we tend to understand topics more when we are interested in them. I applied all these tips to my practices and I saw a big improvement on not only my score but my ability to comprehend passages.
I took my third SAT—which was hopefully my last—2 months after I began my self-study. When I was about to see my third SAT score my heart was racing, because I knew I was DEFINITELY not going to take it again, and luckily for me I didn’t have to because my English score increased by 60 points, which for me was more than I expected. I was very proud of myself and was happy I didn’t settle with my last score
This was one of the most important moments in my literary/language experience not only because I got better at comprehending passages, but also because I never gave up on myself and knew I could do better, even when it felt like I couldn’t. With the confidence I gained from this experience, I was able to encourage my family and friends never to give up on anything. I was also able to tutor my brother on his SAT—which he passed—, by teaching him the material I learned, and this built a better bond between us. This was one of the most salient lessons I’ve learnt in life and has helped me help others believe in themselves.
Cover letter
In this essay, I talked mainly about the struggles I faced understanding the reading section of SAT’s and how it demoralized me. During the course of this essay I used a few rhetorical devices and stylistic approaches to engage my audience, I used things like personification and descriptive adjectives in order to paint picture in the mind of the reader.
Since this was a narrative I used an anecdote to craft my essay. My essay was written in scholarly essay format with a formal tone. I tried to employ new vocabulary that I had just learnt to make it more sophisticated. My main audience in mind were people have struggled or are struggling with reading extensive passages.
My purpose of writing this narrative was to share the importance of never giving up and perseverance. My essay was written in first person and my attitude towards the essay (my stance) was passion for knowing one can do better.
When writing this essay, I looked at past narratives we were given in class to read and tried to adopt some styles especially on the description of things. One of the passages that really influenced my writing was “kitchen” by Banana Yoshimoto. What fascinated me the most was the description of their characters and environment, and how it engendered me to feel like I was in the story itself.
Another passage that helped when developing this narrative was “African English from the hood to the Amen corner”. This helped me because he talked about something a lot of people could relate to, which was what I wanted to incorporate in my essay.
I used the “writing a literacy narrative” article from Norton to help guide my steps, which I found very useful. In my essay I used the fact that I wrote SAT 3 times as a form of pathos in order to substantiate my credibility. With this, the readers can feel more confident and have in mind that if I can do it they can too.
In conclusion, while writing this essay, I used a lot of material given in class to guide and improve it. This vastly improved my knowledge on literacy narratives and how to write them, I also tried to keep my audience in mind while doing so, by making it easier to relate to. And the experience of writing the essay made me appreciate the significance of my narrative even more.
