Where It Began
My favorite days when I was in third grade were Wednesdays. Growing up in an academically rigorous charter school, there were so many high expectations and rules enforced in place, even when you were young. I was never taught my native language by my parents, so English ended up as my first language. I was able to grasp this language pretty quickly, growing up with two older sisters who read and taught me, as well as the help I got in school. Reading quickly became my hobby, whether that was through the form of a physical book, or an ebook. I always leaned to the form of technology because in school, there was a lot of access to technology. We were assigned work on interactive learning websites such as NoRedInk, IXL, and EdPuzzle, which made my love for technology grow. This love for technology grew into a passion as I got older and began to pursue new languages--the programming languages of the future. This journey with language has always been considered very special to me because wherever and whenever I struggled, I was followed by grit and determination.
Growing up in an African home, I was always taught that education comes first before anything. Family is important, and that they’re always rooting for you. I was always afraid of failure. Anything lower than an 80 would send me home, panicking to return my paper to my parents. I barely had time to myself when I was young, because I was always striving to be good. I got so caught up with this, I didn’t have time to figure out what I wanted to do. No passions, no goals. Just do good and go to college.
Wednesdays. My eyes lit up whenever the charging cart full of Macbooks rolled into the room. The computer grinned at me as we stared at each other. It was time for NitroType. NitroType is a typing platform where you compete and can race with your friends. You learn about the keyboard and you get your stats as a typer. The races where you had to type out stories were my favorite. The keyboard clicking, kids laughing, repeating the stories out loud and around was enough to make my heart race with passion to win in first place. The letters flashed green as I typed each letter correctly. As I whispered to myself the words as I typed it, the car began to move ahead of everyone else's as the sound of groans echoed around the room. The words flowed smoothly from in my head, out my mouth, and onto the computer.
Where It Continues
I took a computer science class in seventh grade. A crab, two dogs, a cat, and an alien all floating in space. This was the first coding project that I ever made, on a platform called “Scratch”, when I was 13 years old. Scratch is a block-based programming website where you would take these literal blocks of code, and make these interesting projects with it. I've seen people make games out of it, including snake games and adventure games. (The image here is my project.)
Unfortunately, my journey with computer science would end up getting cut short when my teacher got hit by a bus and she didn’t return for the remainder of the school year. I got home, and played my favorite game called Episode on my tablet. Episode was a coding platform as well, where you code interactive stories with their own programming language called Donacode. You can publish them online for people to read. I opened my computer and went on the website, and signed up for an account. After I signed up, me and my Chromebook had a staring contest to see who knew what to do first. You had to do everything yourself. I went on YouTube, and searched up “Episode Coding Tutorials”, to get a gist of what to do. I browsed online to generate ideas of stories to write about as well. Weeks later, several stories, and over thousands lines of code later, I finally finished up just one part of the whole story. Just one. This is actually much harder than I thought. Some days were extremely easy, watching the whole screen flash green for a second, meaning your code successfully ran, free of errors. The most exhausting thing was seeing red squiggly lines and a big red “X” on the top, just because you missed a parentheses, or forgot the quotation on a piece of dialogue. This was one of the many hardships that I began to face into my career in coding. (Image here represents one of my many writing/coding projects.)
In high school, I ended up taking 3 computer science classes through the course of my freshman to junior year. Introduction to Computer Science, Introduction to Data Science, and Machine Learning and Advanced Algorithms. In my Computer Science class, the first day we learned about converting base numbers. The words went from in my ear, to out the other. I sat around confused, looking around me, where the majority of my counterparts were men. I felt alone and confused, questioning if this path was really for me. Suddenly, I felt 9 years old again, without a sense of identity.
A vivid memory I have is when I took my first quiz in computer science I stared at the paper. I looked around me to see everyone writing and calculating things while I blankly stared at the paper, fidgeting with my fingers. I turned in the blank paper, and walked out the classroom dragging my feet. I wasn’t surprised the next day when I got the test back and saw a big red “0” on my test. I looked around me to everyone else, and the sounds of "100", "80", and "75" echoed all around me. It's just me and my zero.
A most recent story that I have takes place in my Introduction to Computer Systems class. In our first week, we learned about converting base numbers. I felt my heart sink again when my professor started to discuss it and the words began to go over my head again. I went home and I spent the night watching videos on YouTube over it, doing the math in my notebook, and when the quiz came, I did the calculations with ease. I didn't feel nervous at all. I was happy to check my grades to see a 94 on it.
Closing & Authors Note
Like José Olivarez’s Maybe I Could Save Myself By Writing, who struggled with identity and finding himself until he started to write, and Amy Tan's Mother Tongue, who used writing to prove to others her proficiency in English despite doubts and odds from others, I see myself in both of these stories. I didn't know what I wanted to do until I touched and became familiar with the computer. When I wanted to pursue a career with computing, I've heard so many times that computer science isn't for me. That I am not going to do well because I am a woman, and computer skills are a mans job. Yet, I am the one that people turn to ask for help when their code isn't working. It is my goal to express this upon everyone, specifically to women, that there isn't a limit onto what you can and cannot do. In a world that is built to benefit men, it is up to us to break these odds. I have learned programming languages such as Python, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I want to prove myself as an example of someone who defied these roles and stereotypes.
AUTHORS NOTE:
When I first saw this prompt, I felt worried, because I don’t have anything memorable about my language. I was only taught to speak English, and I learned it pretty quickly, so I didn’t know what to write about. I felt stuck for a while until I thought to myself that spoken language isn’t the only kind of language there is. There are also programming languages that people can write, body language that people can express, and I wanted to convey my relationship with language through programming, where I have a lot of memorable experiences. When I read other narratives, I felt out of place because being the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, I thought I would have a similar story to everyone else's, but this one was a little harder than I thought. I also liked implementing real world problems into it as well, because less than 22% of computer scientists are women. When I was introduced to tech, I never realized the alarming ratio of men to women until the add/drop season ended, and I was one of only five women in my class of twenty. This explains why I ended up so passionate about it. I wanted to keep going because I just will never forget the first time I wrote my first block of code. The excitement that I felt was something that sticks with me, and keeps me pushing forward. Personally, I liked twisting this narrative into a different kind of language, because this journey is my passion and something that I have been doing since I was young.
Works Cited:
- Olivarez, Jose. “‘Maybe I Could Save Myself By Writing.’” Medium, GEN, 19 Sept. 2019, https://gen.medium.com/young-chicago-authors-maybe-i-could-save-myself-by-writing-poetry-latinx-teen-79752108d0b5.
- Tan, Amy. "Mother Tongue." Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Rhetoric and Reader for Writers, edited by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford, 7th ed., Pearson, 2010, pp. 34-44.
Credits:
- Ana BG - "Fresh spring red flowers over blue textured background"