The world needs more chocolate

My Language Story

or The Bad Habits of a Lizard

Like any college student, I have an abundance of bad habits.  Mine, however, are nothing new.  They?ve been in place since I was very young. 

            I was born on March 10, 1985, at 12:45 a.m. at Good Shepherd Medical Center in Longview, Texas.  Enter bad habit number one.  I have a tendency to stay up ?til all hours of the night.  That?s when I?m awake and when I?m most alert.  It?s not my fault.  That?s just how I was born.

            My literacy story starts fairly early in life.  Unlike most children, my first word was not the endearing ?Ma-ma? or even the equally precious ?Da-da.?  I just had to be different.  When I was four months old, I spied the gleaming golden arches and exclaimed, ?Donna!? (which translated clearly means ?McDonald?s).  Once inside the shrine to all things unhealthy, I spoke my second word: ?fwy,? also translated ?fry.?  Ever since that fateful day, I?ve gotten a warm fuzzy feeling in the core of my being when I thought of grease and salt.  Junk food obsession was actually my third bad habit.  My second one started at the age of three months, with my first drink out of a real cup: Coca-Cola.  Caffeine is my friend. 

            When I was 18 months old or so, I visited a zoo for the first time.  There I saw such captivating creatures as ?zee-zees? (a.k.a. zebras) and a hippopotamus, something which I cannot spell now, but could pronounce then, instead of the general term, hippo.  Thus began my tendency to complicate everything instead of taking the easy way out (bad habit number four).

            I could count to ten before I was fifteen months old, and could sound out letters before I was two years old.  I had a little chalk board set that held magnetic letters and numbers inside.  My mom would read me a book and then have me spell words from the story out on the board with the magnetic letters.  By the time I started in Kindergarten I had read fifty some odd books. 

            I started writing my letters at the same time I started learning to read.  I could write my name by the time I was three. 

            Before kids are allowed to start Kindergarten at White Oak, they have to take a test.  I had to know my letters, numbers, and colors.  I also had to be able to write my own name, which with nine letters in just the first name is annoyingly long to a five year old.  They didn?t just test whether you knew the material or not, they tested other factors as well.  As a result of their tests, I was placed in the G/T program, where I stayed until graduation. 

            White Oak used the writing to read program, which helped with reading, but they didn?t enforce spelling or grammar for several more years.  So by the time they tried to teach me to spell, I couldn?t and was convinced, logically so, that I didn?t have to learn.  I trusted my teachers, and they?d never corrected us on that stuff before.  They couldn?t be wrong.  I still have problems with spelling (bad habit number five).  This was never illustrated more clearly than the 4^th grade spelling bee, where I was the first one up and the first one out.

            In Kindergarten, I wrote full sentences and stories.  One of which was published with some other people from my class.  This was in the pre-spelling and grammar stage when we were first learning how to use computers.

?Wuns upon u tim their livd sum Pilgrumz and sum Ideinz and thea helpt ech uther.  Thea mak koorn.  Thea feast.  Thea sol sum turkes. The turkes sed gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble gobble.  I am thankful for Pilgrumz and turke.?  (The White Oak Independent, Thursday, November 22, 1990)

I had a good five hours of homework every night during Kindergarten.  By the time I finished that grade though, I?d read over a hundred books in that year alone.  And so began my obsession with reading.  That frequently got me in trouble during middle school, because that was all I would do (bad habit number six).  White Oak also participated in the Book-It program and Accelerated Reader, both of which encouraged me to read even more.   A.R. though, wasn?t really pushed that much until middle school, where I became highly involved in the program. 

We learned cursive writing in the third grade.  However, I don?t write ?correctly.?  In fifth grade or so, I saw a friend write her E?s differently.  I ended up changing the way I wrote, because I thought hers were much nicer.  During middle school, my writing was published for the second time, this time in the National Library of Poetry?s Hearts of Glass.  In high school, I taught myself calligraphy and took a Psychology class, where I learned how to write analytically about myself.  Last semester I took a Creative Writing course here, which reminded me of my love for writing, something that I?ve started doing again.  As a result of the class, my writing was published for the third time.

My mom was probably the greatest influence when I was learning to read and write, because she worked with me all the time.  Over the past five years, I don?t know of much change that has occurred in my language, with one exception.  Last year, I started coming to LeTourneau, where I moved in with an Alabamian roommate.  I grew up in East Texas, but I never had an accent.  My mom was from all over, so she didn?t have one specific one.  I could pick one up if I wanted it though.  However, as soon as I moved on campus, my nice un-accented voice began to sound suspiciously Alabamian.  I could still turn it off though if I wanted to (number seven). 

I talk on AIM a lot, and as a joke, I began typing in a Southern accent to goof off.  Now I type like that all the time on there, and it?s seeping into my speech, combining with the Alabama accent (number eight).  Other than that though, I don?t really know of any changes that have occurred. 

Since I?ve always read so much, I generally had a bigger vocabulary than most of my classmates, but that was about it for development in the last five years, or at least pure language development.  Bad habits on the other hand?