Being Illiterate

Iv’e undoubtedly taken illiteracy for granted for the majority of my life, most of all in school. The lifestyle Americans live now calls for being able to read and write, and if I didn’t know how I wouldn’t be able to write emails to people, talk on Facebook, things like that. I can’t really even rap my mind about being illiterate, and not being able to read, write or communicate properly with my peers, teachers, family or even people trying to take my order at a restaurant. My Mom is a third grade teacher at an elementary school in Lake Los Angeles, she gets a lot of kids every year who’s first language is spanish and can’t speak or understand english very well, some of them can’t understand or speak english hardly at all. I know this gets frustrating for my Mom, not because she is mad at them for not knowing english, she just can’t communicate with them, therefore she can’t teach them and for a teacher that is disappointing. So if this is frustrating for my Mom then I can’t even imagine how frustrating it is for the students not being able to learn or ask questions. Sitting in a classroom hearing a teacher talk all day and not knowing how to process what she is saying, even though it’s not I would almost feel like that’s a waste of time. These students do learn eventually, and they catch up with their peers, but it takes time and is a tedious process, that calls for a lot of extra time and energy from the teacher and the student. When I was going into my junior year of high school, my Grandma took me and my family on a trip to Europe, we visited London England, Paris France, Rome Italy and Munchen Germany. Luckily for us english is the most spoken language in the world so it wasn’t to difficult to communicate in these countries because people like American money so they learn to communicate with tourists. There was however a definite language barrier when we were trying to read street signs or subway stops. Just not being able to read those things was very frustrating, also sitting down to eat and not being able to read the menu was also interesting. That gave me a little perspective on how it would be to not be able to read. If you don’t learn these things early in life it gets harder and harder to learn them the older you get because when you are an infant you soak up information at an incredible rate but it slows down over time. I took two years of spanish in high school and to this day i maybe know two words of the language. In those classes I hated how hard it was to understand and pick up on. I know people who grew up speaking spanish in their home and english in school, and they understood both languages perfectly, mainly because they were introduced to both of them at such a young age.