Everything starts at Zero

"Zero is where everything starts. Nothing would ever be born if we didn't depart from there... and nothing would ever be achieved!" - Shinichi Kudo.

   

 - Tran Anh Thu, I guess you should change the class. You cannot even know how to make a single sentence that would make my curriculum fail, moreover, affect other friends.

My English teacher used to have a serious personal talk with me after her class. She thought that I did not make an effort to read and remember the documents she assigned because I was not able to write a meaningful sentence; it was often like: “The police detects the criminal.” or sometimes “She is going not well.”, etc. I knew nothing but the fact that my teacher was disappointed in me. Whenever I turned in my paper - a short paragraph- in class, my teacher slightly put mine aside from others’ papers. Despite being aware of my weakness, I still felt sorrowful and bored with learning English. 

I started learning English later than my classmates who had been in English-speaking nations; however, somehow miraculously, I passed the entrance exam of the English majoring class of grade six in a secondary school for the gifted. At the time, the only English skill that I was confident about was my speaking skill. I spent most of my time before the exam practicing speaking with my sister who studied in Singapore; undoubtedly, my speaking score was the highest in my class. Technically, I learned English grammar inattentively, so I was not able to write correctly. When I moved to the city for secondary school, I realized that my urban friends did not only speak English clearly, but they also could write English understandably. They arranged the sentences so well that they enabled me to guess the title of the whole passage even when I started to read in the middle of it. 

Now, I am writing, trying to reminisce about the past papers in my grade six which I got zero. Nevertheless, I am proud of myself. Thanks to my previous struggle from ground zero, zero, I have gradually developed a certain level of writing proficiency; I received an acceptance letter from Depauw University, a 45th-ranked university of liberal arts; and I have begun to develop a more advanced level of writing with a college style that works with American cultures.