Personal Narrative: The Woman In The Classroom

Imagine a seventeen year old girl with a beet red face sprinting around a college campus. She is holding a crunched up test admission ticket full of Chinese characters that she kind of understands and two yellow pencils that she has stabbed her hand with multiple times. Her test time is 3:30 and it’s currently 3:45 and tears are running down her face. Well, that girl is me. My whole life I have been enthralled with language. When enrolling for my junior year at Marian High School I saw the words “Mandarin 1” on the course catalogue. I asked my Spanish teacher if she thought I could handle two languages at once and she looked at me in the eyes and said, “Estas loco”. So naturally I decided to take Mandarin. Prior to this class I had no idea what to expect and I did not know a single person who spoke Mandarin. I sat down in class the first day of school and realized there were only ten girl. The next couple of weeks were brutal. I honestly think my Mandarin teacher Jessie Guo is …show more content…
I knew I already missed the test, but I knew I was going to be so mad at myself if I did not find this building. Finally, after a straight hour of opening up random doors on the University of Lincoln’s campus one opened. I ran inside looking for anyone that might know where to find my testing room. At this point I called the number on the Confucius Institutes website and 老师 Guo. But I could not find the Confucius Institute. I was on my way out if this random building when I saw a lady. I immediately started to franctily ask if she could help me. I feel like normally if someone needs help and they run into someone who only speaks Chinese it’s not very helpful. But when this women started to speak to me in a gibberish of Mandarin I one day hope to understand I could have kissed her. She took my to her grandson that took me by hand to my testing room. The test proctors were so kind and nice to me, but I obviously missed the