Harvest International

Written by Sara Elmeshi.

I have always struggled to enjoy school; I never really felt connected to the education system and absolutely hated it. This mostly had to do with the fact that I never saw the U.S as a permanent place for me. I’m an immigrant and came with my dad under a student visa. It was always our intention to return to our home country once my dad finished graduate school. Therefore, school for me always felt useless or temporary because I always saw it as “I’m going back home, an it’s gonna be completely different.”  

So, once the war happened, it was official. Any goal of mine being able to come back was gone. It hit me, “I didn’t learn anything for all of elementary school.” Coming into high school, also known as the most important years of your life, I felt stuck. I felt completely lost until I met my English teacher. 

I loved everything about analysis and reading. To me, it felt so easy; it was a dissection of the people and what you felt like that writer meant, but formatting the writing. It felt like science to me, having a hypothesis, which was the idea of what the author wrote, having my reasoning, proving it through my results, which in this case would be the quotes, and finding a conclusion. I continued English with my teacher all the way up to AP Lang, AP Research, and AP Seminar. Writing is what gave me the confidence to believe in myself, being able to express myself articulately, and properly made me feel invincible. It helped me organize my thoughts, and it also helped me find my future career path. Because in a way, reading and analysis is very similar to reading people’s behaviors and traits, the “why” of why people do what they do. I owe everything to my teacher, but I am extremely grateful I never gave up on myself and continued to read and educate myself. I hope to do the same for my future students.