My Visit at the CESL

I was so excited when I found out that we got to visit with students from different places around the world. When I got there I realized that there was a variety of many different students that were all in the same English class. It did not matter where they were from, they were all there to learn how to speak English correctly. When we were waiting for the class to start, many of the foreign students were laughing, joking, and sharing there stories with there friends being obnoxious and energetic teenagers just like us American kids would do. For some reason when you hear people speaking a different language, you do not think they are like you in any way. You automatically think that they are weird or different, you wouldn't never realize that you have so much in common. It makes you realize how a like we are.

The girl that I got to sit down and meet with was so amazing! We instantly clicked and started talking about the funniest things. Even though we had those assigned questions we had to ask them, I started asking her random questions like what her favorite store is and what TV shows she likes to watch or even who she thought was cute in the room! :) It was so much fun to listen to her because we were so similar. I felt like the questions helped, but having a casual conversation with her made her more interested and also taught her a lot of slang. She told me that her favorite TV show is Gossip Girl and how we agreed on the best looking characters and also her favorite store is Forever 21! We laughed and joked about things and I think it really made her smile.  When I asked about her family on the other hand, I think we found our differences. I asked her if she missed them and why she even came here. She looked at me like I was crazy and shook her head saying "no not really, we want to leave and study some where". Which I understand it IS very important studying, but you could tell that it meant everything to her.

I also sat with a guy and he was very amusing as well. He explained the family thing a little bit better for me. I asked him if he had any brothers and sisters, and he looked at me weird and said no. He told me that in China you can only have one child but you have a cousin that you get close to. The family question made a lot of sense to me after talking to him about it, because I could see how you would want to get out and do something for yourself like going to a University. He also told me that the Chinese are very selfish back at home, but when there is a small of them for an example here at Arizona, they all act nice to each other. He said it was unusual for you to talk to anyone other then your own family and you always put yourself first. What made me happy was that they were enjoying Arizona. I knew it was hard for them to be that far away, but they love it here.

When reading "Letter to Mexico",  I got a negative vibe from the story. I didn't like how she wasn't proud of where she came from. The only thing that I could relate to the short story was that the girl that I talked to said that the hardest struggle for her is talking to cashiers and clerks, trying to get them to understand what she is saying. In "Letter to Mexico", she got a letter from her friend Rosa in decent English when she was a Spanish speaking women and when she struggled to write a Spanish letter back to her. I could see that it would be really hard for some one like my friend that I talked to from China to do the same. What made me really happy was that she found me on face book and even though her whole face book is in Chinese, she went out of her way to write in English to me. Even though it was only a short sentence, it meant a lot to me and also meant that she was really trying. I am happy that we got to meet with these students and I hope we can do it again!!

Journal #2

I changed my text twice because at first I wanted to write about my face book page because it seemed pretty easy, but then I realized I barely even update my status's enough to analyze them. So, I ended up writing about my college essay. Only because it was SO easy to write about since I tried so unbelievably hard to impress the colleges I was trying to get into...but come on everyone did that. In the story "Pass", Boyer Rickels was trying to get across the idea that through out the main characters life he questioned his sexuality putting up a persona by being some one else in front of his friends and not expressing him self or being proud of it. I would relate my college essay to this story because I felt like while writing my college essay, I not only tried to make my self sound as this "perfect" girl who would be great for there perfect college, but I changed who I really was. I will never forget giving my college essay to my brother and him responding, " this does not sound like you". I relate the two because in both we lost our identity in the process only to impress others. Some differences would be that he chose not to say anything to his friends or be confident of the fact that he was gay and it was more of a life long front that he put up, when mine was basically a really exaggerate piece of paper written so they can know myself in a nutshell. But together, in the end, they both are about acceptance and putting up a persona of someone your not.