Literacy Story
Im, Esther

>>ESTHER: Hi, my name is Esther and you are about to watch a video of some of my literacy memories.

[Piano Music Plays]

>>ESTHER: The earliest memories that I have of my writing was I believe it was the last grade in my preschool and teachers were making a very big deal about this one day where we were going to start writing. I think they were just trying to play it and just trying to get us all excited about writing but it did the opposite effect for me; it got me really anxious.

[Strings Music Plays]

>>ESTHER: I remember going home and telling my mom that I didn't want to go to school because they were going to make us write. 

[Piano Music Plays]

>>ESTHER: There was a time when I felt I was quite illiterate. My mom, on Saturdays, I think it started when I was around six, she would have me sit - I remember it was by the window - where she would open up a Korean workbook and she say that your job for today was to get through so and so pages of this Korean workbook; I hated those words. 

[The sound of Thunder]

>>ESTHER: Maybe two or three or five years after we left Korea we went back for a few months and I think that's when my youngest aunt, she sat down with me and taught me the Korean alphabet; it was like a light bulb went off in my head because up to that point - I think my mom did show me the alphabet but I needed to actually memorize it and learn it.

[Piano Music Plays]

>>ESTHER: I could now read and write the words that I knew in my head. I almost didn't take the time because whenever I saw that letter or that symbol it would equal that word in my head so it was really, really interesting. I don't think writing became a hobby for me until later on in life, maybe in college. The fear of writing, it went away I think when I was in junior high. I had a teacher that I really liked, she was a history teacher, and she would have us write essays; I think we wrote them pretty much every week. We would cover a lot of history and I think she was really passionate about history. We would write essays about the content that we covered that week and there were actually tests, I don't know why I actually enjoyed taking the tests, but for some reason it was something I actually worked hard on and looked forward to every week when we did those. 

[Piano Music Plays]