I
never really thought about what places shaped me into who I am. I'm going to
start off with both sets of grandparents houses. I spent most of my childhood
alternating from house to house, always visiting grandma and grandpa. My
grandmother taught me how to speak Armenian, she showed me so much kindness and
I wanted to be just like that. She also showed me how to appreciated people who
are kind. My grandpa helped me with my confidence. When I was younger he would
always take me order. Which I always hated because I was so nervous and soft
spoken, but it ended up helping me. Relating to my culture I went to a school a
town over from Woburn, in Lexington there was a school called Armenian Sisters Academy.
I learned more about my culture from this school. There is a bit of a down side
to this school though, I was neglected in my education. I had fallen behind in
my classes, my teachers did not help me when I had a question. They only seemed
to pay attention to my classmates who were at a normal pace in the class. I
have always been embarrassed because of how that school treated me. Around
second grade I started to receive tutoring from an elementary school in Woburn.
I would leave during the last class of the day to go to the White elementary school,
I would go there for speech therapy, math, and English help. A year later I transferred
into public school. Public school felt like a nightmare to me, none of the kids
seemed really nice. There we're also a lot of kids in class, keep in mind my
old class only had four kids in it. My confidence disappeared after my first
year in public school. Everyone liked to pick on each other which I rarely ever
saw back at my old school. I wished I was invisible, kids used to call me
stupid because I was slower when learning something new. That's when I started
to grow extremely sensitive to what people would say to me. I guess you could
say that those kids also motivated me in some strange way, because I
gave up most of my time doing school work. I would skip recess and say after
with the teacher for extra help. I just wanted to feel comfortable being in
class when being called on for once. I always felt anxious in school since I
was in the fourth grade. As for middle school, that just felt like a train wreck
to me. It was like elementary school, but the kids were just plain evil. So I'm
just going to move on to high school. I think that's where things sort of
started to come together. There is a good and a bad side to high school shaping
me. I feel like I have grown a little bit of a callus so things don't really
hurt me or bother me as much. But, at the same time high school has caused me
to have a little bit more anxiety while doing homework and projects than
before.
