My primary educational experience can be divided into two experiences. From the age of
five through eleven, I was a student in the California education system. I was placed in an ELL
program as soon as I joined first grade because I had learned Spanish at home and stayed in the
program until I was in fifth grade. I did not know the difference between a traditional classroom
and a classroom for multilingual learners. In California there was not much of a difference seeing
as how the majority of the student population were multilingual learners. At home, my older
siblings fluently switched between English and Spanish, a beautiful blend of the two, without
room for hesitancy or a trip of a word. My mother held onto Spanish as much as she could but
slowly slipped into English as she saw how much language assimilation was needed to survive in
the States.
