I started out eager to please my teachers. My worst areas in school were math and handwriting (most of that was because I am left-handed and pretty much right-brained). I remember my first C in math in 3rd grade and I thought I was going to flunk out of school. When I finally got my first F, in health during 7th grade, it was more of a joke than a tragedy. Well, at least to me. My mother didn't think it was very funny. I got other F's in gym and later in college in bowling. Ah, the beauty of the American educational system's grading: where your performance in physical education carry just as much weight as the real classes. It seemed that with each year I began to realize just how much a joke grades were. I always thought of them as a means for people with average intelligence to feel better about themselves. One girl in 6th grade who did a lot of brown nosing, Missy Woods, came to me one day and said caustically, "How come I get straight A's and you get straight C's, but you are in gifted classes and I'm not?" to which I replied, "Even the kids in special ed can get straight A's. Doesn't mean you're smart." As far as I was concerned, grades only really reflect how much you please your teachers: doing homework, participating in class, showing up on time (or at all), and kissing butt. I spent time in detention, Saturday School, Thursday School (when there wasn't enough money in the school budget to keep the school open 6 days a week), and In-School Suspension for the following reasons: being late to school and not doing homework...oh and one time in 4th grade for my little sister and I flipping off the mean old school bus driver as she drove by our apartment (the only two black kids in the neighborhood, like she wouldn't have guessed whose little fingers those were poking out of the front door...tee hee). It got to the point that I no longer cared about how I did in school and regularly skipped classes and showed up late for school. The school system should have taken a closer look at effective punishments. Gee, you come to school late and skip classes? Okay, we'll stick you into suspension and if you're late to that then you have to stay home for three days. Oooh. How much of a joke was this? Well, I would skip my Thursday Schools to go to work and then when I got in trouble I'd go into the principal's office pretending to cry because I forgot (when I'd skip it to go out with my friends after school) or that my mean boss wouldn't let me come work late or else I'd lose my job and so instead of out of school suspension like I was supposed to get, I'd get another Thursday School assignment. I was one of the tragically good kids who was being unfairly punished so I always got extra privileges from the monitor which I took advantage of. They trusted me too much. My intelligence was for the most part ignored. Yeah, I took the highest courses available in almost all of my subjects except in math (which I was just one level below the honors courses), but no one noticed my GPA had a range of 1.9 to 3.8 (the only B was in math), they just cared that I wasn't realizing my potential (meaning my potential to do the aforementioned teacher pleasing things just to get a good grade). I never did homework unless I felt I needed the practice, I never studied unless I didn't know the material, I read my textbooks from cover to cover at the beginning of the term out of interest and zeal for the subject and then rarely picked it up again, and always scored in the top 1-2 percentile on standardized tests (except in math where I was in the top 5-3%). I have always said that I was a bad student, but an excellent learner. In high school chemistry I came up with a method of using a particular means for working out chemical equations which my teacher Mr. Gardner would get mad about because I wasn't doing it his way which involved useless and redundant computations. A more receptive teacher might have been interested in how I had developed this, but Gardner, who after I had spent a month in the hospital with cancer missing the important concepts which he never really showed me and had to make up 5 classes' worth of work gave me a D because I never was able to finish making up the work for his class, never struck me as being a receptive or empathetic person. This same man wrote me a damaging recommendation letter which contributed to me not getting much needed scholarships until my mother read his letter and was outraged and then he had the audacity to come to me after I finally won a scholarship from Ohio University to ask if I could help his daughter get one too since we were going to start at the same time. I think the main reason why I tried a chemistry education major when I started out was not to follow in his footsteps, but rather to have his job once the school system shook him off. I had taken a chemistry contest held by Ohio University (I don't know nor care if his daughter was entered in it, although I don't doubt it) and placed 10th in the state. I also took an American History contest that I qualified for the State finals for. Anyways, everything in my life had pointed to the fact that I was very strong in language. From the age when I began reading to the fact that my reading level was always at least 5 years ahead of what grade I was in to making it to the state level of the National Spelling Bee in 8th grade (where I was featured in the national advertisement for the contest in Washington, DC) to the fact that I won a few essay contests in high school and was named poet laureate of my high school my senior year. I started learning French and Spanish in 5th grade through my gifted program, but when I got to 7th grade they would only let you take one so I chose French. I continued it all the way through high school and did not pick it up in college because I was going to be a chemistry major. I began doing poorly in my chemistry class and things only got worse when I retook the first class so left with only one quarter to make up my mind I decided to fall back on my French. Unfortunately, because I was qualified to take 300-level French courses which ran in sequence I had to wait until fall quarter of the next school year to start taking French again. Having to wait a year to take French worked out well for my going abroad because my freshman year I had neither the grades nor the money to go, plus the program wasn't being run that year and the following year I would have already started taking the courses that I would have taken abroad, so I go into the program and worked all winter long to finance what my scholarships and grants didn't cover for the trip. I had visited Europe in 11th grade only because of a $1000 scholarship I received that paid for over half of the cost (or else I would not have been able to afford to go) for 9 days. This time I was going to live there for 3 months. The quarter before I went was a difficult one. I was working in the dining halls on evenings and weekends. I was also taking German and Spanish and my first linguistics course. I had previously wanted to major in psychology after taking child and adolescent psychology and educational psychology and learning about language acquisition, but I knew that I didn't have the time and money (almost all of my financial aid ended after 4 years so I had to finish in 4 years) to do it then after I took linguistics I fell in love with it and it was exactly what I was wanted to study. When I came back from Tours, I focused on my new linguistics major and it became more important to me than my French major. By the middle of my 3rd year I taught my first ESL class and knew that upon graduation, after getting the living abroad bug, I was going to move overseas and teach English upon graduation then come back to the US and teach either ESL or French. My 3rd year, most of which I had senior standing from working my tail off to graduate on time, I spent teaching English, doing my linguistics and French classes and TEFL pedagogy courses while trying to decide on which country to live in. I had it narrowed down to France, Togo, Russia, and Taiwan. France was out only because the only available program was only a few months and didn't pay much. Togo was out because it involved working for free and I knew I didn't have the money to do that. So I signed up to learn Russian, but Russia was out by the end of that year because while the cost of living was much lower, the money would not translate to much coming into the US and I needed to pay off my loans and put some money aside for grad school. So I dropped Russian and picked up Mandarin. I graduated from OU finally finishing my linguistics thesis (on the factors that influence the occurence of the uvular /r/ in non-native French speakers) and got my BA in French and linguistics and on August 24, 2001, four days after my 22nd birthday, I moved to Taiwan.