Category: Student Posts

I am not very fond of writing. At High School, I used to write with the motive to get good grades. If I put it in the right way, it was never from the heart, and always under a time constraint. This was until I wrote my college application essays. It was as if I was writing, in the real sense, for the first time. It was a feeling of accomplishment since it was my passion that drove me to write.

Today, while writing this essay https://muditajainn.wordpress.com/conclusions/ , it was that same feeling but with doubled ecstasy. I wrote my heart out. This phase of putting my thoughts on paper made me have a deeper understanding of myself. I cannot wait to express my original self throughout this semester. By the end of it, writing might just become one of my passions.

My literacy narrative is about how my experiences moving between countries shaped how I read and write today. Navigate to the page here. While only several sentences/points went into my narrative from the free writing exercise, it helped me remember and confirm how I felt in certain points of the past. I wouldn’t say I learned anything new about myself through this narrative, but it gave me a chance to look back and think about my incentives for reading and writing the way I do today.

I have never thought that I can reimagine my English learning career. It is very interesting for me to extrapolate all of my experiences and combine them together. The free writing helped with bring back all of my memories and some details like the looks of my middle school English teacher. When I look back at it, it was an interesting experience with struggle. There wasn’t any elements surprising or new, yet the combination made me realized how did my English skills improve. I think other people would be interested with the Quichotte book since it is published last year.

–Jimmy Wang

2020/02/05 this was the picture of me and my friends after I gave my senior chapel talk

It was the winter of 2015 that I decided that I would seek a change in my life. I had a video chat on a chilly night in November with Phoebe (or I think by then her name was Angela, and her name had always been Angela growing up), who was my middle school classmate, my best friend, and who took a big risk and went abroad. She applied to a American high school—Thatcher, in California—where according to her, everybody rode horses. It was almost bedtime in Shanghai, and a clear and bright Saturday morning in Cali. As we were talking, she went out to the nature. From the video camera, I could smell the freshness of the berries and cherries amongst the luxuriant foliage on the trees behind her. I asked Phoebe, “what trees are these?” “You gotta come here and we could figure it out. But there is one thing”, she said with a genuine pleasure, “I enjoy everything here. It is spiritual. It is free. It is nurturing.” And from that day I made a decision that impacted my entire life.

            Yes, if you’re still guessing, I was a Chinese student. I spent over 10 years, in Shanghai. I was at a top elite middle school, where we did classes from 7am-5pm. My English—uh, not so great—I would be fair: I think we all knew we sucked but we couldn’t do anything about it. And my decision on that November night brought me closer to proper writing, or to put it as the way I thought of this in 2015: how to write like an American.

            I joined TOEFL camps. And yes, that’s also true—the alleged Chinese training camps were all true. Alright, I admit it. However, I do not feel ashamed of it. Indeed, I enjoy thinking back on the history of my own growth and end up finding a TOEFL camp at the very first. I was bold. We learned how to make a statement, put some logic into our paragraphs, find some examples, etc. I believe my writing was probably rigid, dry, or any words that would make it not a good writing. I felt stressed during that time. However, TOEFL gave me a chance to explore knowledge at a small boarding school in Asheville, amongst the rugged North Carolinian mountains.

            I finally came to America in the fall of 2016. I want to stress that by going to a school in the U.S., my perspectives did not only change. Indeed, The way that I read and write jumped to another level. For example, before high school, I did not know about racism; I did not know about gender equality movement; I did not know about American presidential debates, etc. I was so restricted to the environment that I had been in—there was no other race (I used to only see Chinese people in my lives, and therefore I knew nothing about racism); there was also no one questioning the gender inequality. Great news: we don’t do political debates in China. Ha! Now looking back to my first year experience at my high school, I feel like I was a nicer looking Frankenstein (I think I look better than Frankenstein) trying to wiggle my way through all of the weird, new, unknown things around me. My change was big.

            Asheville School offered me a platform to succeed. Under my 1^st year Ancient history teacher, I practiced critical thinking and writing analytical essays. I spent the next three in his advisory group, making a life-long relationship with who guided and inspired me. The following year, I was lucky to meet another inspiring teacher, Mr. G, who introduced me to the world of creative writing. I built myself into a more dedicated and skilled writer, and with the recommendation from Mr. G, I joined a summer writing workshop at Kenyon College. There I met famous poets and writers in person. I teamed up with students whose parents won the Pulitzer Price. Later, I took the president seat of creative writing club as a senior, publishing our writing and sharing our voices with the local community. We read our works publicly at a local bookstore. These were all the crazy things that I couldn’t had imagined doing. I’ve changed, and I could not tell you which specific experience changed me. But I cannot describe how happy I am to be the way I am after doing all of the above.

I’m grateful of Phoebe, of my past, of TOEFL, of Asheville School, of all of the things that made me, me. I’m Jimmy, and welcome to my blog.

Throughout my educational experience, my reading methods varied, and the differences between the Western and Eastern cultures broadened my perspectives to read and look at the world in diverse ways.

When writing about the essay, which is about how my experience shapes the ways I read, it was a longtime flashback of the past few years. It seemed strange at the very first since I had never paid attention on the stories that impacted the ways I look at literature, and I had no ideas what I should do with the free writing that had no rubric and no specific requirement. Because of that, I deeply recalled from the beginning of my educational journey. I had never thought any differently of myself in the way of pursuing knowledge, especially in terms of literature. Reflecting my overall experience, I found myself, surprisingly, like to look for connections in different things. “In drawing these comparisons, I’ve come to see that no matter how the narratives are depicted or the emotions expressed, human experience and morality across cultures is tightly connected, without any formal agreement.” Though the different sides of the world are remarkably distinct, the human nature is all in agreement. This perspective also provides me a new clue to explore something new when roaming in the world of literature in the future.

I was initially worried about writing my first essay in months, in addition to it being my first college essay. Though, upon writing this narrative, I was able to reflect on my past experiences in a more culminating way then I was able to experience on my last Zoom day of high school. 

Since the English class I took during my second semester was not as writing focused, especially given that it moved to a pass/fail course, I consider the last time I seriously focused on my writing to be my Asian American Literature class. I loved the class material so much that I never realized how much my writing grew. I learned for example, to incorporate humor into my writing, to embrace gender and race differences in my analyses, and to play around with essay structures. Thinking about this class helped me reflect on how much my writing has changed throughout the years. 

In terms of the writing process, I was hesitant about the freewriting exercises. In my previous English classes, I have tried activities similar to the twenty questions where I wrote about the time and setting. I found that the pre-writing activity I used for this essay was much more effective because I had already laid and expanded a bit on instances that I could draw on for this essay. I particularly liked the listing out ten experiences, because I was able to connect two moments, one from when I was younger and one from when I was older that illustrated how my opinion on reading changed. While I decided not to write about those specific moments, I tried to weave the theme of reading changing from a distraction to an experience throughout the essay. 

Once I had completed the pre-writing, I used everything I had noted down to continuously write for two hours. When I finished, I was over the word limit, but it was easier to whittle down and organize what I had already written instead of pre-deciding what I wanted in each paragraph and then writing it all down.

I feel that these techniques simplified my writing process and I will definitely try to incorporate them the next time I write about myself, in whatever form that can take (job application, summer internship, another literacy narrative).