Author: r1hong

Growing up as the oldest child in a family is a hard thing to do. A lot of people think it’s all difficulties and work for the oldest child; in fact, most people believe that they often don’t get what they want, they can’t get away with anything, and they always get in trouble. Although it’s complicated, I still find it unique to be born as the oldest child in the family. My journey being the oldest child was quite different from other children. I did not receive enough love from my parents when I was young, and I was treated differently from my siblings. There was no true definition of happiness for me and nobody knew how I felt to be the oldest.

As the oldest, it was difficult to get my parents to spend time with me. Instead, I would hear things like: “spend your time wisely, I need to feed your younger brothers or I need time with your brothers.” It was tremendously hard for me to cope with the situation because I was not too far ahead of my brothers’ age during that time. I was still a kid who needed time to stay close to my parents. My youngest brother is six years younger than I am, and my other younger brother is only three years apart from me…that did not make my parents wanted to spend much time with me. I had a lot of moments with my parents when I was younger, and they were remarkable times. But one thing that separated us apart was when I began elementary school. The transience of my happiness began to fade away.

Things got worse. I needed to wake up early every single morning to get myself ready for school, and came back home every late afternoon. The only time I met my parents was night time, but still, we did not talk to each other much. I felt parentless as a young child. I was not able to express my feelings toward them because I was not confident enough to spit it out. I would spend time with my brothers whenever I felt lonely because they were super adorable when they were young, and I loved to tease them so much. However, there were moments when I made my youngest brother cry, and they stared directly at me with their aggressive and angry expressions on their faces. It hurt me even more and it made my relationship with my parents became more fragile.  

Even though I was raised differently from my younger brothers, I’m so privileged to be born as the oldest child in my family. Being the oldest is hard but throughout this unique experience, it silently taught and trained me to live independently. I was brave enough to ask my parents about my childhood, and I was surprised by their answers. My parents planned and raised me intentionally differently from my brothers because they wanted to teach me self-sufficient-life-lesson. I was always thinking negatively towards my parents as I grew older. However, by knowing the truth about the way my parents treated me, I couldn’t love them more!

Most importantly, it felt hopeless to be the oldest sibling because I was frequently given the most responsibility. At the same time, it felt great to be the oldest because I got to set many rules for my brothers, and they have to listen to me because if not they will get in trouble with my parents. In addition, I love to be the oldest sibling in the family for all these reasons but the best reason is to see my parents love me and my brothers equally.

Literacy is a really tough class for me to handle since it’s an ESL to me. I’ve been working on improving many skills: writing, speaking (fluency), and other skills that are relevant to literacy. I perpetually use many online resources to develop these skills, and it encompasses Khan Academy, Newsela, and other free available sites.    

A few weeks ago, I was given an assignment by my literature teacher to write a short poem, and mine was about the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand.

• Hate is the darkest force the world has ever known
• Hate comes from the difference in skin color, the difference in belief, and the difference in gender    
• As a result, hate causes great suffering, violent discrimination, and lots of death
• Hate is the murderer to millions of innocent people
• Those innocents who died from hatred are us
• They are us
• They belong to this world, too!
• There is always an option in life
• To show compassion not discrimination
• To show love not hate
• The world, in fact, would be peaceful if there was never hate  
• I’m here in front of you today to tell you that hate can be overcome
• Because once we show love, people will always remember what we’ve done  
  • Now, take a moment to close your eyes to show respect and love to those 50 innocent people who got killed from hatred in New Zealand

Besides the poem, I love to read news about world current events and science articles. Newsela has everything, I really enjoy reading its articles since it comes with different reading levels; I can pick a level that’s reasonable for me, and it has various quizzes that I can do to reflect on my reading. It also comes with many other awesome functions and activities.

We also use Commonlit for reading and answering questions.  

I also use this site to develop my vocabulary skill.

Part of the Literacy class this year, we started learning about the American history by reading a myriad of interesting texts. Our facilitator, Cara, gives us the printed-texts because she wanted us to practice our annotation skills so that we can implement it to the upcoming SAT test. For each text, Cara designates us to find the words that we struggle with, and we have to find the meaning for each word and use it in a sentence.

Excerpt From The Jungle is my favorite text of all because after reading the text, I always wonder about where my food comes from.

The Jungle: With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great majority of Packingtown swindles. For it was the custom, as they found, whenever meat was so spoiled that it could not be used for anything else, either to can it or else to chop it up into sausage. With what had been told them by Jonas, who had worked in the pickle rooms, they could now study the whole of the spoiled-meat industry on the inside, and read a new and grim meaning into that old Packingtown jest—that they use everything of the pig except the squeal.

Jonas had told them how the meat that was taken out of pickle would often be found sour, and how they would rub it up with soda to take away the smell, and sell it to be eaten on free-lunch counters; also of all the miracles of chemistry which they performed, giving to any sort of meat, fresh or salted, whole or chopped, any color and any flavor and any odor they chose. In the pickling of hams they had an ingenious apparatus,1 by which they saved time and increased the capacity2 of the plant—a machine consisting of a hollow needle attached to a pump; by plunging this needle into the meat and working with his foot, a man could fill a ham with pickle in a few seconds. And yet, in spite of this, there would be hams found spoiled, some of them with an odor so bad that a man could hardly bear to be in the room with them. To pump into these the packers had a second and much stronger pickle which destroyed the odor—a process known to the workers as “giving them thirty per cent.” Also, after the hams had been smoked, there would be found some that had gone to the bad. Formerly these had been sold as “Number Three Grade,” but later on some ingenious person had hit upon a new device, and now they would extract the bone, about which the bad part generally lay, and insert in the hole a white-hot iron. After this invention there was no longer Number One, Two, and Three Grade—there was only Number One Grade. The packers were always originating such schemes—they had what they called “boneless hams,” which were all the odds and ends of pork stuffed into casings; and “California hams,” which were the shoulders, with big knuckle joints, and nearly all the meat cut out; and fancy “skinned hams,” which were made of the oldest hogs, whose skins were so heavy and coarse that no one would buy them—that is, until they had been cooked and chopped fine and labeled “head cheese!”

It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions- a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white – it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.

There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms; and the water from leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. This is no fairy story and no joke; the meat would be shoveled into carts, and the man who did the shoveling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw one – there were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit.

[5]There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage. There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old barrels in the cellar and left there. Under the system of rigid economy which the packers enforced, there were some jobs that it only paid to do once in a long time, and among these was the cleaning out of the waste barrels. Every spring they did it; and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water – and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers with fresh meat, and sent out to the public’s breakfast. Some of it they would make into “smoked” sausage – but as the smoking took time, and was therefore expensive, they would call upon their chemistry department, and preserve it with borax and color it with gelatin to make it brown. All of their sausage came out of the same bowl, but when they came to wrap it they would stamp some of it “special,” and for this they would charge two cents more a pound.