Hello everyone, my name is Zolciree Marte, you can also call me Zol. I am a junior at New Jersey City University majoring in Education K-12/ Spanish. I am part of the TIP program at NCJU in which we get experience in actual classrooms working one-on-one with students to make sure this is what we want to do for the rest of our life. I'm taking this class because it is required in my major and it's the last class I can take before passing the Praxis Core. I'm an easygoing person, sometimes quiet other times a little loud. Some of my interests/hobbies are reading, writing (especially in Spanish), dancing, working out, and spending quality time with family and friends. I am a good listener and one of those friends that you can easily ask for a favor, advice, or just to sit and talk about anything.
I was born and raised in a different country which means that my literacy history might be a little different than others or maybe not. English being my second language made everything more difficult in terms of achieving goals in this country, but that didn't stop me. I remember when I was a child literature was my favorite subject, reading stories, writing essays or poetry was my favorite thing; my parents were always helping with homework, my dad was good at math and history, and my mom was good at literature and science, they're very strict so have to get A's in every subject but sometimes it was hard for me because all the pressure that they put on me. I started reading and writing in cursive when I was 5-6 years old, and my school tested me to see if I could skip first grade, I passed the test, which means that I went from kindergarten to second grade, which was a big change in my life, I was always the youngest person in the class. I remember being alone in the classroom reading a book while the other kids were playing outside. But things started changing while I was growing up.
Throughout my middle and high school years, my interests started to change, I was more into math and sports, and I lost interest in reading (the thing that my parents didn't like but supported me anyway). I won some math competitions in school and some volleyball games. But that wasn't enough for me until one of my literature teachers told me something "You are a great student, a great player, a great person, but you are an amazing writer, don't throw away your art", then she put some challenges for me to complete (writing poems, novels, monologues, essays, etc.) That teacher changed the way I see life. I started reading and writing a lot, showing my art to other people, and seeing how they reacted was the best part. But then I had to move here, and everything changed again. Learning a new language and living in a different culture felt so wrong to me; I was a teenager dealing with two languages at the same time. I had to start from zero, learning sounds, words, pronunciation, and style of writing, it was difficult, but I tried my best and I'm still trying. I started listening to music in English, watching TV shows in English, and trying to speak the language as much as possible. My love for reading and writing disappeared because I couldn't express myself in English the same way I did it in Spanish, I was frustrated but my parents and my new teachers inspired me to keep trying because one day all my effort would make sense. After a couple of months, I felt more comfortable with the language so I started to read a new book but this time in English, highlighting the unknown words and searching for their meaning so I could comprehend the book.
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