Time, Confidence, and Culture: My Journey with Literacy

When I think about my issues with time management every single day I always end up failing to do so. This issue with time management was crucial, I couldn’t get assignments in on time and I would also be behind on the most important assignments in my time at high school. I was with my teachers almost every single day of the week talking about my progress and it was pretty obvious I wasn’t doing as much due to the amount of things I had going on in my life at the time. I started to create a successful schedule and I used this to be able to ensure my work was submitted on time. I realized making a schedule and using a planner to jot down things I needed to do was extremely reliable and I could finally get my stuff done at the right time in a more efficient and successful way.

I started learning to manage my time and when I started to ignore things that I wanted to do, I started to work on things I needed to do. In the past, I never gave myself the time to write about things I needed to do. My writing would always be mixed up and talking about nothing that involved my culture. Once I had more time, I started to see how my culture could talk a lot about my language and community. When I decided to make time for writing, it gave me space to express my own background. When I decided to write a lot more about my background, everyone started to realize the culture within the Mexican Community.

Confidence was another obstacle I had to face. I was always nervous about sharing my work because I was worried that my culture wouldn’t make much of an impact on anyone or that my writing didn’t sound as smart as everyone else. I wondered if I should hide certain details about my culture like mixing in Spanish Holidays and Traditions because I felt as if people wouldn’t understand how our culture impacted the world. But that all changed because the first time I shared a draft that included all those details, I was surprised at how many students connected with it and some of them were my non hispanic friends. My friends even encouraged me to create more writing that included stuff about my culture. Those experiences made me want to dig deeper into my writing style. I realized then sharing my work with my fellow classmates wasn’t usually a bad thing but, it was better in order to get feedback from and learn from your mistakes to create something better.

I realized that trying new writing strategies helped me bring culture forward. Outlining details gave me a better path to connect personal experiences and drafting helped me find the purpose in my writing. When I start revising, especially while reading my paragraphs out loud, it helps me make my voice stronger while keeping my cultural identity intact. Instead of ignoring my differences in order to sound more efficient, I began revising my writing including more stuff about my culture. This shift reminded me that literacy is more than just following the rules but it’s about using your language to share your identity and history from your race. Writing with the strategies that highlight culture has made my work feel more precise and it helped me see myself as a part of a larger story about how language connects people.