Having a new English teacher can be a roller coaster of new procedures and emotional responses. My new teacher’s name is Jolene Taylor, and she comes from Plains. She came with a goal–to help us learn vocabulary, a goal that junior English students often do not share with the instructor.
For your information I was born in Beaver, Utah. My parents immigrated from Aldama, Chihuahua, so my first language is Spanish. Since I moved from Utah to Texas when I was 5 years old, I have been in an English language learning program and have taken a test called TELPAS every year. After many years and hard work trying to learn perfect English, I finally got out of the program at the end of my sophomore year.
I did not like having to do vocabulary exercises at the beginning of a new year for Mrs. Taylor. I loathed (note: vocabulary word) having to start an assignment the second week of school especially when it required memorizing 10 new vocabulary words each week for a quiz every Friday. When I first saw the vocabulary words, my classmates and I looked at each other in horror. I didn’t know what any of them meant or what parts of speech they were. A tiny vision prognosticated (note: vocabulary word) through my head: I’m going to fail.
Even though I’m learning a decent amount of new words every week, I get confused and remember a definition from another word instead of the one I’m trying to remember. I got annoyed, so I stuck my head in my binder to memorize the definitions for the words for that week.
My first test grades from vocabulary were terrible. Being a I-can-never-have-a-below-90-score student, those test results triggered me. I would do corrections to boost my grade to a 70 after I bombed the tests.
As the weeks passed, Mrs. Taylor demonstrated how to use the vocabulary words in sentences and how they formed parts of our daily lives. I didn’t think much of it and focused on remembering the definitions and parts of the speech of each of the 10 words each week.
Even though I thought I wouldn’t use the words outside of her class, they did in fact help me in journalism. Did you know in order for your brain to memorize a word, you have to see it used more than 15 different times? Yeah, I learned the hard way.
Now I realize these vocabulary words have nuanced (note:vocabulary word) uses. I have to say, they really helped my yearbook stories, newspaper articles and editorials.
I can tell that this weekly vocabulary is improving my English language skills. One of the hardest things about learning English is all the ins and outs of the different words. For instance, in Spanish, one word might work for several situations, where in English there are four completely different term.
As I’m writing this personal column, I wonder if I can cajole (note: vocabulary word) Mrs. Taylor into giving me extra credit?
