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Comparing Learning To Read 'By Malcolm X And One Voice'

818 Words4 Pages

Luna 4 Karen Luna
Professor Rodney Alvarado
English 101
5 February 2018
Knowledge is power
Reading & writing has been around for as long as we can remember. Whether we are reading books, newspaper or even text messages, we practice literacy in our everyday living. My experience with literacy has always been pretty much normal for the most part, of course I struggled here and there but nothing out the ordinary. When I read both short stories “Learning to read” by Malcom X & “One voice” by Susan Madera it brought me back to my journey of literacy. Malcolm X speaks about how literacy influenced his life, while he was self-taught in prison he motivated himself to read and become literate. Susan Madera experience was very different to Malcolm …show more content…

Spanish was my first language and English was my second. Even though I speak English better than Spanish now, I struggled as a young adult. I spoke English but the way I spoke was entirely different from the one my teacher was trying to show me. It was very hard to transition from Spanish to English, I would jam words together or I would even make some up. I know exactly what Susan Madera felt because I had once felt the same. I too had people laugh at the way I spoke due to my poor speech, I could relate to Susan Madera when she said “being bilingual was not a blessing, it was a curse” (Madera 1). I eventually was able to learn and speak the “proper English”. I feel different about being bilingual now. I am fortunate to be able to juggle two different languages. My journey didn’t stop there I still had a lot more to learn, I would soon find out in middle school that it was only the …show more content…

In Malcolm’s X autobiography he mentions he “became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in letters that I wrote” (Malcolm X 1). That quote meant a lot to me because I recall a time in middle school where we had to write an essay about our heritage and I wasn’t confident in myself because I felt that I could barely speak the proper English and now I had to convert my thoughts into words. I was only comfortable in expressing my self verbally not in a sentence structure. I was just getting comfortable in speaking in front of my peers, I was definitely overwhelmed. It was embarrassing for me to be struggling with writing, especially since I was born in the U.S. It didn’t take long for my English teacher to notice I was having trouble structuring a simple essay. My teacher strongly recommended to my parents that I enroll into a writing class. Unlike Malcolm X I had the privilege to have a teacher help me write and put my thoughts into words and eventually paragraphs. Malcolm X had to teach himself in prison by writing the dictionary down. The writing classes I took allowed me to expand my mental views, similar to Malcolm X once he learned to

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