My obsession with Post-It notes began as a second-grade act of rebellion. Miss Martin was the teacher everyone hated. She was mean and vindictive; she was spiteful and held grudges. Miss Martin berated our class daily and made us solve math problems during recess. Nonetheless, Miss Martin was my favorite teacher. My mother, intent on securing a more fulfilling life for my brother and me, forced us into a cramped home with my aunt, her husband, and three cousins. I was abruptly isolated. My isolation was caused by my cousin's limited understanding of Spanish, the only language I knew; This isolation did not stop at home. School, my sanctuary, became hell in a nutshell. My classmates teased me for the way I pronounced “cafeteria,” for my hand-me-down clothes, and for having to stay behind during recess, reciting foreign syllables. Kids my age felt like giants. My only escape was in the form of everyone's nightmare: Miss Martin. Miss Martin didn’t hesitate to help me, to guide me through math problems and English pronunciation. She’d “psst” me over to her desk, ready to explain a single math problem for twenty minutes. So, in a true betrayal, I stole. Finally fluent enough to hold a conversation with my classmates, they bestowed upon me a task to prove myself as one of them: steal something from Miss Martin’s desk. A she was giving our class clown a lecture, I grabbed the first thing I saw: a stack of pale yellow Post-it notes. The weight of the stack in my pocket took on the immeasurable weight of my guilt. "These are Miss Martin’s Post-it notes." And although that statement should’ve compelled my guilty conscience to return them, I held on. These were the Post-it notes in my notebooks, containing her translations and math tips. In a way, these were the Post-it notes that taught me English. Post-it notes became something for me to hold on to, a hand for me to hold when Miss Martin wasn’t present. I’d write my own translations– “miercoles = Wed-nes-day”– from the syllables she taught me. Post-it notes followed me until I bought a new pack, until third grade, until middle school, and until now. These pale yellow squares cling to the pages of my notebooks. I write down devices for rhetorical analysis essays, and I jot down, “correlation does not equal causation,” in the middle of class. Moreover, I’m no longer the only student who benefits from Miss Martin’s Post-its. As a peer tutor for my school, I encounter countless students who were once in my position: scared, isolated, and eager to learn. Post-it Notes became a source of inspiration, a guide for teaching. I write down thesis statement templates for Abigail, I translate “slope” and “mean” for Jordan, I scribble down book recommendations for Camila. I smile at the relief on their faces as I tell them these Post-its are for them. I reencounter my own yellow, pink, and blue squares in their notes weeks later. After school, I help my younger brother understand Emily Dickinson stanza by stanza. Teaching isn’t just a job for me, it’s become my life. Post-it notes have become a way for me to express and communicate my one true love: teaching. My main concern is no longer fitting in with my peers; it’s helping the people around me understand math, history, Spanish, or English. This way, I’m paying Miss Martin back for my childish thievery. I aspire to hold a student’s hand, as Miss Martin held mine, and to teach them, one Post-it note at a time.

I immigrated to the United States, not by choice, roughly ten years ago. I was seven. When I tell people that, they usually shake their heads and sigh. A seven-year-old doesn't have an epic immigrant story, a seven-year-old barely remembers immigrating. That's what usually goes on in their heads. But I remember. I remember crying before we left, I remember having to leave everything behind, I remember not understanding why. To this day, the only remnant I have of my life before the United States is a stuffed bear, Senor Luna- Mr. Moon. I remember being bullied at school, by other Mexican children who didn't know any better. I remember sobbing at my aunt's kitchen table because I no longer understood math. I could no longer read. School was my everything, it had always been my everything, and it was suddenly ripped away. I loved learning, I loved being educated. I loved school, and now it was like a typhoon, dark, and windy, and terrible to be inside of. I thank a lot of who I am today to Ms. Martin, my teacher that gloomy 2015. She pulled me out of the typhoon, she taught me English. But, honestly, I've written countless of essays about her. And my love for teaching now goes beyond her. Because although, yes, Ms. Martin taught me English and settled the seedling of being a teacher in my mind, I saught this path on my own. Knowing and enjoying the English language are two very different things, although I did know English, I wasn't having any fun. It took a million teachers for me to have fun. And I can name them. Ms. Martin, Ms. Thach, Mrs. Keen, Mrs. Honda, Mr. Ferris, Ms. Mejia, Mr. George, Ms. Goldman, and my current AP Literature teacher Mrs. Smith. It's taken the effort of all these teachers, and myself. These teachers have collectively taught me resilience. I've struggled in all their classes at some point or another, I struggled in elementary school and I struggle now. The difference is that now I love the struggle. I love being challenged. I, like before, love school. I love reading so much I read until I pass out most days. My ultimate goal in life, my honest goal, is to teach someone so effectively and passionately that they want to teach others as well. All of these teachers love English so much that they've taught me to get over my grudge, to love English earnestly as well. Passion inspires passion. And who better to teach English than someone who struggled with it herself?

I don't speak farsi, but my students do. Growing up bilingual, I grew up struggling. Words escaped me and I often ran out of English or Spanish adjectives to describe my emotions. I'd resort to mixing them together, becoming embarassed when my peers or family asked me to repeat myself. This repetition, however, has helped me much more than I could fully comprehend. As a peer tutor for my school, I know what my students feel like. I know what it's like to struggle, I know what it's like to mumble and turn away embarrassed because you're not sure how to say, "I need help!" I know what it's like to stay silent and watch as your grades plummet. Knowing that feeling better than anyone, I've taken it upon myself to encourage my students to speak up- even if I don't fully understand. I've sat with countless of my peers, shoulder to shoulder, as we slowly read words in English. I've taught these teenagers to sound it out, loud and proud, something they were too scared to do before. Although I only speak Spanish and English, I'll find any way to successfully communicate with my student. Wether that way is having another peer translate for me or using the internet, getting through to each other is the most important part of tutoring. That's the real usage of technology- communicating. Feeling the heat of my peers' shoulders as I help them has only strengthened my one true goal: to become a teacher. When I was younger and first immigrated to the United States of America, I had no peer to help me. I resorted to the internet, quietly sounding out the English words emitting from my mother's cell phone. Words I didn't understand. At least, not until a human came forward and taught me. To this day I owe my resilience, my hopes, and my dreams to my second grade teacher Ms. Martin who- just like I do today- sat shoulder to shoulder with me. Her index finger slowly traced the words under the books she brought me as we sounded out the word "Wednesday" during recess. This student-teacher relationship has inspired me much more than she will ever know as I seek out my teachers today. Ms. Martin not only taught me resilience, she taught me the importance of human connection. Connection is my passion. I connect with my "students," just as I seek to connect with my teachers. These experiences- a teacher seeking to connect with me and me seeking to connect with my peers- have inspired me to take connection a step further as I settle in my goal of becoming an English professor. I want to be able to communicate my passion and love for literature just as my peers communicate their frustration with math or as my teachers communicate their own subjects. Communication is the key to teaching, and teaching has completely taken over my life. I'm sure it's what I was put on this planet to do. And now, as I write this, I'm glad I could communicate that with you.

Until the eighth grade, I read wrong. Until the tenth, I read wronger. My issue when I was twelve was that I didn’t read; , the issue before that, is that I couldn’t read. Not because I wasn’t illiterate –, because I was Mexican. In fact, I was in fact, very literate, just not the only hiccup was that it was in a language anyone around me no one understood but me-. My fluency was in Spanish. Eventually, I became fluent in English too and even convinced myself I had and truly believed I had mastered it. But until I was fifteen, I faced the real bigger challenge: I didn’t understand English. According to my mother, I was fluent in English two months after we arrived in Sacramento, California. This came with a job every bilingual immigrant knows: translating for their parents. By the time I was eleven, I was convinced that I hated reading. Reading meant frustration, having to translate words whose Spanish translation didn’t simply mean adding an ‘o’ or ‘a.’ It meant embarrassment. If reading became a chore, writing was a much worse punishment. Education became frustrating. I despised reading and writing. Yet, I felt the need to be good at writing. I had something to prove to myself and others. My writing was perfect in a way, formulaic, precise, and utterly soulless. It was my assignment, so I wrote. I was a robot. Then I wasn’t, suddenly I’d transitioned into a half-cyborg monster. A change occurred within me. It began with a book, I was thirteen, and Slaughterhouse-Five landed in my hands. I was shocked. I was married to structure, I’d never read a book where the author stops midway through his thoughts and starts new ones. Seeing a novel like that was so freeing, I was like a Victorian man seeing an ankle, and for the first time in my life after reading a book, I felt. Of course, I was still half-cyborg and I quickly ran into a new issue. I wanted to be the new Vonnegut, the new Bukowski, the new everything great ever written. It wasn’t until I was fifteen that I began learning English. It wasn’t only the books I read, which were so new and interesting I analyzed them myself, but the advice and reassurance my teachers gave me. A dam broke within me, I wrote, and wrote. I followed the structures while my half-cyborg half-human mind filled everything in, and my words flowed onto the paper like a waterfall. At seventeen, fully human, the waterfall doesn’t always flow to its limit. My metamorphosis is still in progress- I struggle to tame the water into a steady flow that continues to be mine. I’m scared of a dam springing up, stopping my waterfall, haunted by my robot past. Whenever I find myself stuttering, frustrated, I see that robotic writer again. I’ll show her my latest essay, double the length required, and she'll smile at the torrent of words. Both the robot and I will exhale, feeling relief that I’m finally, after a decade, understanding English.