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Chanel Lee
Professor Filbeck
English 091
15 September 2014
Independent
Growing up, both of my parents were always working, leaving my older brother to watch
over me. Although I was always with my brother, I learned at a very young age to be
independent. As a child I have always done well in school academically, especially compared to
how my brother performed in school. Throughout elementary school I mainly placed above
proficient on my STAR exams and got 4s with the occasional 3 on my report cards. In third
grade, the Los Angeles Unified School District deemed me as a gifted student and placed me in a
program at my school called GATE, which stands for Gifted and Talented Education. It is not
that I just did well, in fact, I excelled. I continued to perform great in school and remained in the
GATE program until I moved when I was ten. The move put me in a whole different school
district but that did not have much of an impact on my academics. In junior high I was on the
honor roll and passed my classes with no problems.
My brother was a senior during my freshman year in high school so we attended the same
school, saw each other daily, and of course he made sure that I stayed out of trouble. Life
continued just the way it had always been but shortly after I started the tenth grade, my brother
had gotten incarcerated and soon enough the independent lifestyle that I learned started to take
effect.Without my brother ever being around, I began hanging out with friends all the time rather
than focusing on school. Despite the lack of effort, I still managed to preform decently
throughout the rest of my high school years and was able to graduate with the rest of my class.

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By the time I graduated high school, my academic status was better than average but I
would not be able to say the same about the relations within my family. Within the three years,
from when my brother got locked up to my high school graduation, the relationship between my
parents and I had crumbled mainly because of how I grew up being extremely independent. Soon
after the incident of my brother, my parents began trying to control every aspect of my life in
fear that I may end up like him. They gave me these restrictions that most kids my age would
find normal, like a curfew, but for me, this was new and not to mention unfair. I remember trying
to understand why at the age of seventeen I had a curfew of 9pm, especially because at the age of
fifteen, there was no such thing as a curfew. My parents allowed me to grow up all those years
with the freedom of making my own choices and that freedom was suddenly being revoked.
I started college straight out of high school and attended for a couple of semesters while
the situation at home just grew worse and worse. The stress from trying to juggle two jobs, five
classes, and family problems soon began showing on my transcript as Ds and Fs. It was not long
after my eighteenth birthday that the stress from everything became so unmanageable that I
finally just threw the towel in. I left my parents and their home on bad terms and went to live at a
friends house. That choice left me with nothing other than a shift in my priorities. Within the
first week of leaving I bought a car to get to work and school, leaving me broke and I still had to
find a place of my own that I could afford, so my only option was to make work my primary,
making school secondary. I mean, I understood that going to school allows me to get a good job
but at the time I already had two jobs so I took on more hours and ran with it leaving my last
semester with a few failure to withdraw on my transcript.
Many others may think that dropping out of school has a negative impact on my literacy
but I would have to disagree. Literacy is your ability to read and write and although we learn to

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read and write in school, the fundamentals of reading and writing are taught back in grade
school, which I feel is basically all you need to know. Like the alphabet, grammar, vowels,
sentence structure, etc. By the time I moved out, I was in college and already knew the basics. To
be honest, I feel that dropping out of school has positively influenced my literacy. For example,
school taught me how to write a formal letter plenty of times but when the time came to write
one, I couldnt remember how. It was not until I worked in a doctors office and was trained to
use the format that I was actually able to retain the information.
For example, when I took my college placement test for English the first time straight out
of high school I had placed in the second to lowest level. Thats with all the reading and writing
still fresh in my mind but when I took the test again, two years after being out of school, I placed
higher than the first. At first the results did catch me off guard because I suspected to place lower
due to my lack of knowledge from not being in school for so long but when I thought about it, I
figured that from everything I learned to do in the real world, whether it be having a conversation
with someone to reading medical reports, I unconsciously retain the information a whole lot
better than mindlessly textbook reading.
My parents also play a huge role in my literacy because their expectation levels and how
I was raised. My parents always expected a lot from me but if they could only expect one thing
from me, it would be to finish school and I have always known that. I think thats why I always
did good in school without them having to force education on me, because I wanted to keep them
proud. They raised me in a way that made me be an independent person and that independent
part of me always wanted to prove to them that I can excel in something that they dont have to
hound me about. My want to finish school and graduate is what pushed my literacy because in
order to graduate, I need to read and write. But I didnt try my best in school just for my parents

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but for myself as well. I love the idea of being independent the idea of being able to hold your
own and Ive always known that in order to be able to do something, you need to know how to
do it first. That concept is what has always driven me to learn anything and everything because
the more you learn, the more you know and the more you know means the more you can do.
After all, knowledge is power.