It’s About Time to Make Time

My View

I came to the U.S. as a 15-year-old from a tiny subsistence farm in the back country of the Dominican Republic. We moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Neither of my parents had a single day of formal education, and I had only a handful of English words when I started the 9th grade at Seward Park High School on Grand Street. I was an English language learner starting from zero.

I didn’t realize this at the time, but my future and who I might become was from that moment on in the hands of my teachers.

I had relocated from a place where I could hitch a ride home from school on the back of a friend’s donkey and live happily in a village without electricity where almost no one could read or write. Would my New York City teachers’ assessment of me mean I was someone to get to know and someone they could help to shape?