Dear visitor
Welcome to
my blog. The blog presents my works which I have done in English 115 course
during fall 2013 semester.
A semester
is a short time, even if sometimes it feels so long. What make a semester in an
English class longer are the memories it brings. Writing about the concepts we
talked about in the class made me think about my past, where I am from, my
culture and why I am here and do what I do. It took me to different places,
introduced me different cultures and also gave me more confident to write.
The
following works are not all about a classic course portfolio, they are about
the life of me and the other people I learned about. They are about the
experience and the history. My works reflects ideas of a community in the form
of English 115 class and developed by
several hours of thinking, brainstorming, talking, and the most importantly
teamwork which at the end demonstrates my progress in learning and practicing
English writing.
In this post
on my blog, you can find two of the essays I wrote for two projects in the
class.
The first
essay –"Places and Changes", represents my discussion about the
places and the influences of them on the people. Last time I wrote about any
building was back in Iran when I wrote about a famous building in the
engineering school for one of my architecture classes. This time however, I
compared two functionally similar buildings, noted the effect of the buildings
on people and society, and I supported my argument using literature. I learned
how to use literature as a support for an argument to express my intention.
My second
essay –"English as a Second Life", is the story of my past efforts to
learn English. As person who has started speaking English almost recently, I
presented my story of learning how to read and write in English, and advantages
and disadvantages I ever had in that path from my childhood to the current
time. The essay explains my progress before and after my immigration from Iran
to United States and somehow compares the learning process in those times. The
essay also represents how I tried to get over my challenges in learning a
foreign language.
I hope you
enjoy your visiting and I appreciate any comment and feedback.
Sincerely
Armin Karimi
Afshar
Progression 2
Places and Changes
Los Angeles, the largest and the most
populated city in California is the subject of various socioeconomic studies.
The city consists of various districts and neighborhoods and its actual border
is hard to understand due to its expansion. The city meets the Pacific Ocean’s
shore on the west and chaparral scrublands surround the city from other sides.
Having the different biomes and topography in the city develops different local
climates in each borderline of it which ultimately leads to variety in
architecture and lifestyle. Los Angeles, like many cities in Southern
California, is an ethnically and culturally diverse city. The city’s immigrant
population dominantly consists of Hispanics, Asians, Indians, with Persians as
the other significant portion of the relatively newly immigrant population.
Several neighborhoods in Los Angeles are colonized the people with similar
cultures, religions, and nationalities which make the city’s structure alter
from one neighborhood to another. Hollywood is famous for being the world’s
movie industry center, which is one of the reasons why each year millions of
national and international tourists visit Los Angeles. There are many public
buildings inside the Los Angeles area: science and education centers, theaters
and concert halls, movie and entertainment related places, and museums. The
diversity of Los Angeles however, does not always revolve around various
cultures among people, there are large economic differences in the population’s
social classes which are identifiable by studying the neighborhoods, and
communities from different parts of Los Angeles. All the diversity in the city
is influenced by economic factors. Stereotypes are made within the population
due to dissimilarities in the income and opportunities. Although public places
such as schools and museums are meant to give services and education to all
types of people in the community, still some of the places doesn’t follow that
pattern; they are more available for some certain people, in the other words,
certain visitors from similar cultures or social class feel comfortable to
visit those places. Availability of a place for a certain culture or class
transparentizes the diversity of the city.
In Luis Alfaro’s essay “Minnie Riperton Saved My Life”, he
describes how he ended up in a different high school than what he was
expecting. He clearly mentions how stereotypical social forces in Los Angeles
affected his life while he was told his brother and he were going to be bused
to another high school in the Valley: “We were really scared about busing. We
had never been around people who were not like us. You know, people like us.
People who shopped at the open-air mall on Crenshaw near Stocker. People who
bought small bags of popcorn from Midtown Sears and later went
roller-skating at the rink across the street” (14). In those few sentences
Alfaro uses several places to describe who he is and how he lives. He uses the
place he lives to describe himself and identify the differences between his
family and the majority of the people in their society. The place Alfaro lived
in made him to believe he is unlike the people who go to the Grant High School
in the Valley. This can be viewed from an alternative perspective; maybe the
Grant High School is designed to be for middle or high class people of the
valley. Or maybe a student like Alfaro is rejected by community inside the high
school rather than Alfaro rejects the idea studying in a Valley high school.
Either way it represents how different places accept or reject different
classes and cultures and how various people think about merging in another
cultures and societies. It is interesting that in most cases the accepting or
rejecting a places has nothing to do with the function of the place.
By comparing two similar public places –in terms of function—in Los Angeles, we
can further understand how places affect the overall characteristics of the
city diversity within the border of the building. The effect is not necessarily
permanent, but it is different from the expectations from the place’s
functions, which the place was built based on.
The Getty Center, museum of fine arts in Los Angeles is one of the places,
which is located on the top of the places-to-visit lists of the tourists. It
took around a decade to build the Getty Center and a lot of expensive materials
and technologies were applied to make it more attractive. One of the best teams
of architectural design and construction were recruited to make sure they
finish the fine work before meeting the deadline. The museum is located on a
hill surrounded by the expensive neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Beside the
parking fee, visiting it is free of charge. The Getty Center –like any other
museum in Los Angeles –is a place of holding several cultural events per year
and this along with rare and valuable artworks from all around the world they
keep in their large halls make it a suitable place for tourists and local
people to spend a few hours in.
However, our expectation of
the Getty Center as a cultural place is fundamentally different from what we
can observe at the building: A multicultural function for a place, in a
multicultural city but people visiting Getty Center don’t look much different.
They all have something in common, they are all nicely dressed. The Getty
Center is a public place, so people from different cultural, economic, and
educational backgrounds should come and visit them. There is no formal dress
code for visitors, so there should be a selecting force hidden in the place to
invite certain people or make everyone to follow similar pattern rather than
their own lifestyle.
“16,000 tons of travertine” (Architecture)
has imported from Italy to build the Getty Center. Travertine is the theme of
the building. Visitors can even buy a cube of travertine with the Getty
Center’s logo on it at its gift shop. Getty Center has a dining room and a
café, which serve relatively expensive food. There are umbrella bins next to
each door to help people in the rainy and sunny days. There are several
balconies to give visitors the view of Los Angeles, without any disturbing
scene visible. It is just like a noble life in a noble building. Using
expensive material for construction, serving expensive food, and the
unnecessary facilities could be the hidden selecting force that attracts
certain people while keeping the others away from it.
Since there might be a
misconception about the function of the place attracting certain people from
the society, it would be helpful to compare Getty Center to another public
building in the same city with the same function, LACMA.
LACMA is similar in function
to Getty Center. They are both fine arts museums. LACMA is much older than
Getty Center and it is famous for keeping modern artworks such as the large
collection of Pablo Picasso’s artworks. The building is descent, not as shiny
as Getty center and the food is not that expensive. Diversity in people
visiting LACMA is not far different from people visiting a regular shopping
mall. There are playing grounds and few grass fields at the back of the
building where families come for a picnic, or bring their children to play and
enjoy watching a few tar pits near the play grounds. The visiting hours aren’t
that long and the museum provides free admission from the residents of Los
Angeles County.
The Getty and LACMA don’t
look like buildings in the same city, as Grant and Belmont High Schools don’t. The
Getty Center dictates us unwritten rules to visit the museum and enjoy the
view, architecture, and building even more than the art they keep inside it,
while LACMA invites us to visit and enjoy the art in the middle of Los Angeles on
Wilshire Boulevard where one can see the city closely, with all its pros and
cons.
The Getty Center also
doesn’t welcome the “People who bought small bags of popcorn from Midtown Sears
and later went roller-skating at the rink across the street”(Alfaro 14), not
because the building stops them from visiting, but because of the background
stories settled in the minds of people to draw lines and borders around places.
Places have the power to
change and arrange. Places can label people, get them closer together or make
them more apart. But members of societies are the ones who give the power to
the spaces. They define the places. They design and construct buildings, and
invite and reject people. The effect of any place is initiated by the concept
the creator of it had in his mind.
Los Angeles is a space,
like a building, but in a greater scale. Although it is a diverse city, living
in it requires following certain patterns. The patterns in each neighborhood
modify the characteristics of the people living in them and make the city to be
dynamic. The city changes and makes us change, and then we change the city
again.
Work
Cited
Alfaro, Luis. “Minnie Riperton Saved My
Life” Another City: Writing From Los Angeles. Ed. David
L Ulin, .et. al. San Francisco: City Lights books, 2001. 13-18. Print.
“Architecture.” The J. Paul Getty Trust. n.d.
Web. 1 Nov. 2013.
Progression 3
English as a Second Life
I was born in an educated family. My
parents paid extra attention to our education by providing anything necessary
for us to be able to go to school and be successful. My experience of writing
started in my very young years. First I learned to express my intentions using
drawings. I became interested in writing because I saw that every person near
me was able to write. I learned Farsi alphabets from copying them from kindergarten
workbooks. I went to school when I was six. My elementary school didn’t offer
English as a course, however, we had the English course during middle school
which taught us some basic grammar, and some vocabulary. They were absolutely
not enough for being able to survive in a foreign country.
I enjoyed looking at the books my
father used to read. The books were mostly in French and English. If they
weren’t medical related books with some pictures of human body and surgical
procedures, they were books with short comedy stories or jokes followed by a
simple cartoon. I couldn’t read and understand the stories, but I could enjoy looking
at the cartoons and guess the stories.
My
parents realized that my brother and I had to leave the country someday and we
have to be prepared for it, so when I was twelve, they sent my brother and me
to a private institute to have a better English education. The private
institute was very helpful and exciting. We used ESL books published by Oxford
University. We continued going to the institution for a few more years until
our heavy schedule on high school didn’t let us continue.
All
those years, I saw English as a challenge and a hobby. It sounded interesting
to spend time in a class talking in a different language to each other. It was
also pleasant when I could watch foreign movies and have a better understanding
of the story because I could recognize a few of the words they used in the movie.
I could speak a few words with my cousin who was not able to speak in Farsi.
One
of my teachers at the institute was a retired civil engineer. He left Iran when
he was young. He immigrated to the United States and went to a college in
Massachusetts. He studied civil engineering and worked for years there. After
retirement, he decided to return and work as an English teacher in Iran. He
always made interesting examples in the class and talked a lot about his
experience to us. He told us interesting stories about his job in the United
States which sounded even more interesting when he spoke in English. He was one of the teachers who was strict
about speaking in no language other than English in the class which increased
the quality of learning in the class. The institute followed Oxford
University’s syllabi and materials which required every class to be taught in
British English which was one of my concerns because the audio materials
provided by institute –on the old cassettes- had a different accent compared to
my teacher’s which made some confusion in my listening improvement. In that
class, for the first time I realized the difference between British English and
American English. I realize how they are different, not only in terms of
accents, but in word choices as well.
My
experience in the English language institute ended when I was in the third year
of high school. My weekly schedule had two periods of English per week. But
this time there were more words to learn. We mostly spoke in Farsi all the time
and just learned a few words and grammar. It was part of the main educational
program so doing well in the class was essential. The class asked us to learn
English through the book which listed the words in the columns and had the
space for us to write the meaning of it next to it in Farsi, flash cards which
had the word and its meaning on the back of the card. Similar daily quizzes along
with the other poor educational strategies which helped many students such as
me successful in the class but with no English skills at the end of the day.
The last year of high school was even more stressful. Nobody cared about
English while we had more serious courses to take care of. Calculus, Physics,
Chemistry and geometry were the courses we needed to focus on because they were
main components of the college entrance exam. The last year made me forget the
reason I started learning English. I focused on the courses that I needed to learn.
I
should also mention the role of the internet in my education especially
improving my English skills. I spent a lot of time on the internet reading
articles, chatting in English based forums and learning how to develop
websites. Although it was not a language class, The World Wide Web taught me a
lot. It gave me instant access to information as well as translating systems
and made it possible for me to talk to other people around the world and
discuss about anything that I was interested in. It accelerated my learning
about softwares and provided me the basics to exhibit my art portfolios to the public.
Music
was also helpful. I listened to American music very often and always looked for
the lyrics of the songs that I was interested in. Not only did they help me to
learn more words, they familiarized me with more cultures and histories.
During
college in Iran, English was used to do research about the materials I needed
to prepare for my classes. Many classes required us to download articles and
translate it from English to Farsi. I used to study engineering, a technology
based major. In order to be able to take further steps in that major we had to
know some foreign language to be able to use the sources on the internet. My basic
English skills and the time I spent on the internet helped me to do better in
school.
Another
critical English related stage of my life was my English tests. At the last
year of college, before I left Iran I had to take an English proficiency exam
–IELTS. I needed a relatively high score for my IELTS in order to be able to
get acceptance from some of the schools abroad. That was critical for me to be
able to obtain a passport. I went to another language school to prepare me for
my test. Learning in the institution was not as enjoyable as I experienced
before. IELTS –International English Language System, is a standardized test
developed in the UK. I took the test, scored high enough, and I continued my
path.
I
left Iran to Turkey. I stayed in Istanbul for a few months were I had my first
experiences of speaking in English. Many people in Istanbul speak English since
they see a lot of tourists visiting the city and some of them often have
businesses related to tourism which make them even better at speaking in
English. I met a British teacher who lived in Istanbul for a few years and
worked as a language teacher there. I tried to meet him more often to have the
opportunity to talk to a native English speaker. I still remember what I
learned from him.
After
three months, I received my visa and left Istanbul to the States. My first
conversation with an American was with a retired US Air Force officer on the
airplane flying from Amsterdam –the city I stopped for changing planes, to Los
Angeles. Unfortunately that wasn’t a nice beginning of a conversation with an
American. He kept talking to me about the difficulties I would have in the U.S.
because of cultural differences. That was the only time I remember that I
really wanted to finish a conversation. Arriving in Los Angeles changed
everything. A lot of people in
California
speak Farsi Which is good for an Iranian in a foreign country; however, not so
good if he wants to improve his English language skills.
After
a few months staying in San Diego, I decided to go back in school and this time
study biology as my major. Starting a new program in English for the first time
was a challenge for me. Thinking about starting it was more stressful than
starting it itself. I didn’t take any English for more than a year at school.
The first English course I took was an introduction to literature.
Before
taking my English class, I took a lot of science courses. I should admit none
of the science classes were more challenging than my English class, and maybe I
don’t need any of them as much as I need my English class. When I was taking
the course I never thought I would miss the class after that semester. It
consisted of several passages, short stories, plays, and poems from the authors
all around the world, from which, some of them where assigned to us to read and
write about. I already knew a few of the authors such as Ernest Hemingway,
Franz Kafka, and Woody Allen; however, many of them were completely new to me. Although
I wasn’t the best in the class, I could understand the literature, and I could
analyze the short story as well as the poems, which gave me the confidence that
I never achieved in anything during my learning process. I can see the
connection in me and people who learned the literacy for the first time and the
steps they took in that process: “I woke up the next morning, thinking about
those words—immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at
one time, but I’d written words that I never knew were in the world” (X).
I
always had the problem with reading comprehension. Maybe one of the reasons I
have a poor comprehension of an English text is because I am translating it in
English before understanding it. My reading comprehension became more critical
when I was about to take my Dental Admission Test. My weakness in the reading comprehension
and my slow reading was more obvious to me as I was getting closer to the day
of the exam. I did research on any source I could to be able to find a way to
improve my reading comprehension skills and the more I looked, less I found. I
realized there are certain skills that can’t be achieved in a few weeks of
practice. I had to use different tactics to achieve a certain score to be
considered a competitive applicant. The tactics are commonly called Search and
Destroy. Although they were not really effective on comprehension of the text,
at least they were effective for a reasonable score. I used the best tactic I
could use which landed me right on the average score.
The
test was an alarm in my head. I should do something about my reading comprehension.
I started changing my reading methods, and I am still looking for a better one.
I am also looking for help from other sources I can find such as internet
articles and similar stories and solutions shared with me from friends and my
professors.
My language
education is complicated. It is far from a classic learning procedure. It took
a long time for me to achieve my current level of language skills, and it might
be an endless path to hopefully getting better and better. I was culturally
diversified by having experience living different places in the world which gives
me the opportunity to learn more. “A multicultural perspective is more and more
the way to understand the world” (Alvarez). I stood in front of my concerns and
never escaped from them; I learned from my mistakes and will continue the same
way.
Learning
a new language is like traveling to a new world, seeing new places and
understanding more about people and their cultures. Learning a new language is
a challenge for everyone, nobody needs to be perfect in it, being consistent
and having progress in learning is the most important.
Work Cited
Alvarez, Julia " Doña
Aída, with Your Permission" The John Hopkins University Press 23. (2001):
597. Web.
X, Malcolm.
"Learning to Read" by Malcolm X.". San Mateo County College
District, n.d.Web. 25 Nov. 2013.
