Pouya Saleh

English 10

Mr. Horton

October 7 2019

​A Twelve year old

His name was Pouya. He was twelve years old and he was living with his mom and
dad and his little sister. Pouya had a very normal and a basic life just like other kids and
he was at 6 grade. He has always been dreaming about the imigration to the USA
because his parents have been trying to immigrate to the USA for about 2 years. Pouya
never thought about the problems that he could have faced if he comes to the USA and
all he cared about was just to see the new culture and new people and just live in a new
country with a new life.
So finally after two years, his parents made it possible for him and his sister to come
to the USA. After they flew, him and his family stayed in his dad's cousin's house for
about two weeks. In those two weeks, Pouya got to see the people and how is
everything working in the USA and how people are in there. His dad cousin gave him a
lot of advice about the schools and how knowing english affects everything and if your
english is not good, then you might face some big problems that you do not like to see.
So that was when Pouya first realized that he has a lot to work on but he thought he can
work on it and get over those problems very easily.
After two weeks, him and his family moved to the state that they needed to live
which was South Carolina. There was only a couple more weeks left until his school
starts. He got to see his school and see how big it was compared to his last school in
Iran. After a couple of weeks, school finally started. The funny thing was that his parents
were more nervous than him but Pouya always tried to stay calm and not be nervous.
As we all know, the first couple days, especially in middle school is more for knowing
each other and getting more comfortable with the teachers and classes classmates. So
the first thing that Pouya realized that is gonna take him a little bit of time because his
english was not good enough to build connections with others. Then his history classes
started with giving him big assignments and quiz over those subjects even though he
did not even know what the subject was about. His english class started to read a new
book which he had to always go home and review over that book hours and hours to
understand the chapters and sometimes, he could not understand any chapters. He
could not participate in his science class because he could not understand what was
really going on. So with all of these things happening to him, he really sometimes felt
like he could not handle these pressures.
All of these problems was keep going on in his school career until he meet his
ELD teacher which helped him extremely a lot for his classes and his grades. His ELD
teachers name was Mrs. Hutchonson. For him, Mrs. hutchinson was not just a teacher
for him, she was the only friend that Pouya had at that time and she was someone that
Pouya could have actually share his thoughts with her. They practice on gramers so
many times. They read a lot of books so Pouya can improve his skills of reading and
writing. But even Mrs. Hutchinson was always telling him that, She could not be the only
one that can help him to improve his english and his grades and if wants to be more
successful, he needs to practice by himself a lot and ask any questions that he has from
his teachers.
The advice that she gave him, really impressed him and made him to work on
himself a lot. He realized that he needs to talk with other people much more and not
being shy so he can improve his talking skills. He started to go to classes that he
needed help at lunch time and even stay after school sometimes. Some classes were
still a little bit hard for him like history and english but the good thing was that he could
understand better about what his teachers were talking about most of the time so he
could do better at tests and assignments. And after a couple of months, he told himself
that “ no matter what happens in life, I always need to be prepared for what is ahead of
me and never give up no matter how hard it is.”