Ramos Gomez 1

Nicolas Ramos Gomez

Campbell, Malcom
UWRT 1103
January 27, 2015
Im Probably An Idiot
English has always been an enigma to me, but I can probably say that about language in
general, or just about anything else. But I will focus on English in this essay or whatever it is.
Being born in Bogota, Colombia meant that my first language was Spanish. I had trouble with it
and remember throwing a book at a wall because of how enraged I was at myself for not being
able to read it when all the other kids in daycare could. In 2001 my family moved to the U.S.
when I was five and a half years old. I moved to very small country town. This place is called
Lenoir, North Carolina.
My mother had been dating an American man and had decided to marry him and move in
with him and his parents. I, being her child, had to go with her. My first real experience with
English was walking into my grandparents in-laws house. I was led by stepfather into this
bright and warm, possibly too warm, narrow hall. It had pictures, of not only my stepfather but
of many other people who I had never seen before, on the wall. There were pictures of people in
graduation gowns, others on boats in tropical places and some of people in front of the house.
There were only six rooms connected to this narrow hallway, but for my five year old self this
was way too much for me to handle. I was led into one of the doorways and into the living
where I saw an old man sitting really close to a TV. Behind him was an old woman sitting on a
couch. They both spoke only English and tried to greet me. I had no idea what they were doing

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and freaked out. They were yelling some alien language at me and quickly approaching me. My
grandfather was diabetic and had a glass eye because of it, this only made things scarier. I held
my ground and accepted my death. Luckily they just wanted to hug me. After this traumatizing
experience I hid in the backroom and talked with the only thing I could identify with, a cat. As I
sat there petting this orange cat I realized that the only people I could talk to were my sister and
mom. Since my sister was a grand total of two years old, I could really only communicate with
my mom.
Being stuck in this situation I just watched a lot of cartoons. They were all in English and
this how I learned. I watch The Fairly OddParents and learned what the word chin meant by
the superhero the Crimson Chin. It took me a while to understand what crimson meant. This
also meant that I learned English in a different dialect than what was spoke around me. When I
finally overcame the fear of my grandparents, they applauded me for speaking proper. I had no
idea what this meant at the time but whatever I liked the appreciation.
Then one warm day out of nowhere came my first family gathering. The day started out
as random people showing up and trying to greet me. I used my new broken English skills to
greet them back but that was about it. Then they moved to the front porch. I sat inside and
watched them interact with each other. I could hear what they were saying but could only
understand about half of it. There were about ten people sitting outside, but I only recognized
my stepfather. All of a sudden they started to get louder and theyre faces were getting red. My
understanding of what was being said went from half to zero because of how loud and distorted
there speech became. I interpreted this as they were arguing and became slightly anxious. I told
my mom this and she erupted in laughter. After she calmed down she told me that they werent

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arguing they were laughing. I was the most confused little boy in existence at that moment. My
confusion of English didnt end there.
I became enrolled in school two days before Christmas break. I walked into a large
classroom filled with kids my age. The desk were organized so that kids sat four to a table. My
reaction, as any other shy kindergartener would have done, I hid behind the adult. This adult
would turn out to be my ESL instructor. Basically she would teach me English. I was sat next to
a table where there was only one other kid. I was afraid to talk to him because I doubted my
ability to speak English. One of the hardest part of learning English was just the stigma of
feeling like an idiot and failing at communicating to another person. As time went on I learned
how to speak and actually read it. At my school we had A.R. (Accelerated Reading), which is a
program that asked you questions based of the books you read. I would read a book and ask the
teacher if I could take an A.R. test but they would tell me no. Their reasoning was that I didnt
know enough about English to take these quizzes. This was incredibly frustrating even as a
kindergartner. Watching as your peers are participating in things that you cant because some
adult says so. When I got into the first grade I was able to take the A.R quizzes and made pretty
good grades on them. As time went on I learned more about English and soon got to the point
where I felt confident. Then came the moment I learned what curse words were.
This happened to me in the third grade. It was right after lunch and my class was just
getting back to their seats. The seating arrangement was so that it split the room into two parts.
The two halves of the seats faced each other. This particular afternoon the teacher, Ms.Waldrop,
didnt come back to the classroom immediately. This left twenty some odd 9 year olds in class
room full of energy. Naturally all the kids started talking and my friend Shimpock made fun of
Chelsey. Shimpock was a skinny, annoying third grader that said mean things. Chelsey was a

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rather round girl who got offended easily and would fight back. They were basically foils of each
other and they were arguing louder than anybody else. The other kid took notice of this and
started to pick sides. These are ordinary third grader things. Eventually one half of the room
sided with Chelsey and the other sided with Shimpock. They were literally divided by the
seating arrangements. This is where I come in. I had chosen Shimpock side and wanted to come
up with a word to call Chelsey. I was dumb and thought that coming up with a word. I started
trying to put together sounds of other words and came up it the sounds sh and it. Present day
me knows what this word means and how society regards it, but third grade me didnt. My next
step in creating this word was how it would be used, I didnt really care about its definition. I
decided it would be a noun. As Im creating this word the only two kids still arguing are Chelsey
and Shimpock. I didnt notice this and yelled youre a piece of shit. At this very moment Ms.
Waldrop walks in. The kids all gasped in horror and Ms.Waldrop gave me the stare of death. For
the second time in this story I thought I was going to die. I wasnt violently murdered but I was
sent to the principals office which meant that I would be murdered at home. I tried to explain to
every adult that was about reprimand me that I made that word up but no one cared to listen.
Days later my Shimpock would tell me what it meant and that I had used it correctly. This was
in fact, a shitty situation.
My next struggle with English would be writing it. It wasnt till the fifth grade where I
had my first formal examination of my writing. In May of 2006 (I think) I took the E.O.G. (End
of Grade) Writing test. I managed to get a 2 out of 4 on it. Thankfully this grade never had an
impact on me other than make feel like failure. When I got into middle school I was placed into
AIG writing. This boggled my mind but I went along with it. Every day in this class we would
pick apart sentence structures and label them for a quiz grade. I hated this and would generally

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get a terrible grade. This only made me feel like an incompetent loser. That is when I started to
shy away from ever having to write anything. I hated the feeling of looking like a complete
idiot. When I got into high school, I tried to not write at all. Whenever a teacher gave us a
writing assignment I would just assume that I was a terrible writer and barely try. I got mediocre
grades on these of projects as I expected. When I took the SAT and ACT I genuinely tried. They
were both argumentative essays. I would give examples that I thought where strong and write
about things that I knew a lot about. I even read them and focused on my grammar. After writing
these essays I felt optimistic about the grade. When my score was available online I immediately
rushed to my computer. I knew I had done okay on the math and reading part but I wanted to
know if my writing was actually any good. I was devastated when I got my scores back. This
only reaffirmed my thoughts on writing. I was terrible and always would be.
Since than a couple people have told me that I know English very well both in spoken
and written form. However, these occurrences still bother me and make me question myself. I
should have probably been more proactive and tried to become a more competent writer and took
some speech classes. I dont know. Its had gotten to the point where I dont really care anymore
but I still hate to read my own writing or hear myself speak because of flaws that I immediately
single out.
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