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In second grade, I was given a Harry Potter book, and it sparked my love of reading (as well as my intense relationship with the fandom). I have read the entire series, all of the companion books, the Pottermore site, and probably about ten novels worth of fanfiction. Not to mention debates had with friends I've found in the community.
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In third grade, my elementary school tried to teach us Spanish. Flash forward thirteen years later, and I'm still learning it. Because the school introduced me to it, I found a language that I love to speak, love to learn about.
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I beat the district record for Accelerated Reader points in fourth grade with 622 points (thank you, Harry Potter). The competition of the AR points and all of the awesome little rewards really pushed me to read big books worth a lot of points, and I'm grateful that it did.
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This was the year that I wrote the worst story of my life, but at the time, I thought it was brilliant, new, or dare I say? Novel. I wrote close to 200 pages, and when my computer destroyed itself three years later, I lost it all.
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My freshman year of college, I took my first college level language class, and I had no idea what to expect. I certainly wasn't expecting to learn as much as I did about the English language. But apparently, before you can learn grammatical structures in a foreign language, you need to understand your own. You need to observe how it all works.
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After taking on a job as a linguist's research assistant, I became exposed to other linguists' research. I actually participated in an experiment where I had to rate the naturalness of a sentence. I thought phrases like "might could" sounded completely unnatural - until I started hearing people saying it left and right. I had just never noticed.
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I've always written poetry. Bad little poems scribbled in the margins of assignments and such. But I took a chance and submitted a few that I had written, and I was published. In a literary magazine and am anthology!
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An education class I had to take introduced me to the term 'code-switching'. Usually it refers to switching between languages, but she also taught it to us as switching between dialects. Since learning that term, I've tried to develop an ear for how people speak in certain situations.
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Last year, I started (and promptly dropped) a classroom management class, but during my brief time in that class, I learned about different behaviors in the classroom. Now, without trying, I notice how students interact with themselves and teachers.
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Actually, I'm well aware that I do have an accent and that my accent gets worse if I'm around certain people. After spending a day with my family over the summer, I didn't think I would be able to get rid of it!
