“So, what are you doing after graduation?” That was the question of the day. I had not
even started to think about the life ahead of me. But, each and every time I was asked that
question, it reminded me that I was grown up. There were seemingly hundreds of people
had entered the building where the graduation ceremony took place. However, through
the crowd I could only isolate the faces of my parents and my first ESL teacher. Perhaps,
I was expecting to see them because they deserve most of the credits for getting me
through the High School. I realized the height of my achievement from the faces of my
parents. They were proud as they could ever be. They almost convinced me that they are
proud because they succeeded getting me through High School. My mother held my hand
firmly and said “Now you are on your own.” It made me realize that my fate is in my
hand.
In and out of school, I have always had someone to keep me focus on my
education. Language, of course, was the main factor that was against my education when
I first entered a U.S High School. I was fortunate to enter a good High school in N.Y like
____________ High School. Rather, it was my luck that I bonded good relationships with
most of the teachers there. Miss. Wells who was my first ESL teacher would be one of
the few people that anybody could benefit from. She gave me home work as she could
possibly think of and I hated her for that. But, it turned out that all my other classes were
depended upon the language knowledge that she handed to me. Since I was not able to
communicate much with other students, she knew that I had trouble finding the way
around the educational system in New York. She found time to sit down with me and
explain things slowly as I understood them piece to piece. In the two and a half years of