English Makes Me Confused

         English is a hard language that I feel terrible to learn. When I first came to America, I could not understand what people talked. Although they were nice to me, I still felt embarrassed. After that, I decided to learn this new language harder. I listen to the radio while I am driving every day, and I watch movies to practice my listening. At first, I just understand a few words, but I still work on that. I think reading books is important because I can know how to write sentences with correct grammar. Sometimes I confuse many words in one sentence, but I need to think about the meaning of the whole passage. After I read, I scan again and find the words that I cannot understand. Looking for a dictionary, writing down on my notebook, and recite them. When I talk to people, I need to speak loudly. Do not be shy. If I afraid to talk, I cannot have any chance to speak out. I think that is a big challenge for me and I enjoy it. I really need the course ENG090 because I can practice my writing skills. What is more, I can communicate with my classmates to share my ideas. I wish I could write down everything whatever I want without hesitation in the future.

An Evening Class

            I think it is a challenge for me to take evening classes because I feel horrible after I get out of class every time. I had an evening class yesterday from 5pm to 7:20pm, and it was a calculus lecture. At the beginning of the class, we took a quiz that took me 30 minutes to finish. Actually, I had prepared for the quiz doing some similar examples before the class. However, the questions on the quiz were much more difficult than the examples.

I began to solve the questions. After few minutes, I was interrupted by my professor, “Teng, do not write it down on the quiz paper, please use your own pieces of papers,” he looked at me in a very serious tone.

“I am sorry, I didn’t notice that,” I said to him. Then, I copied my work to another piece of paper. Nevertheless, my brain was not working because of this incident. “What shall I do next?” I asked myself. Usually, it was my dinnertime, and now I just wanted to eat the food. The more I thought about eating, the hungrier I felt. With the starvation in my stomach, I could not concentrate to solve the problem. I felt the questions were getting harder and harder, finally, I gave them up.

            I would not have abandoned the quiz hadn’t I taken the evening class. I think evening classes do not fit me, and I will not take them anymore.

From Math Lab

            A black woman who was wearing a turquoise T-shirt was sitting beside me in the math lab. She raised her hand, and that meant she did need some help on her math.

            A tutor went to her table and asked, “Can I help you?”

            “Yeah, I am working on how to find the slope of the equation, and that makes me confused,” she said.

            “Well, do you have some questions that I can focus on?”

            “Yes, I do,” she answered, “here is the exercise from my homework.”

            “OK. I need to show you a formula to solve these serious problems,” the tutor said. And then, he wrote down one formula on a piece of paper and explained to her, “Y equals mX plus b. The coefficient of X is called ‘slope’, and b is ‘y-intercept’.”

            “Wow! I never saw that before,” she said.

            “Let’s do one example together. So, we need to plug in numbers for X and Y, and then, we will find the slope and y-intercept.”

            She nodded and said, “That makes sense! I feel better right now! Thanks for your help!”

            “You are welcome.”