Writing 101

My Personal History with Regards to Writing

Learning How to Write in Turkish

As a child I wasn’t too much interested in school. To the point when I was attending first grade at the elementary school in Ankara Türkiye, halfway through the school year I was the only one in class who still wasn’t able to write. I suspect my school teacher thinking that I was retarded. At one point we had a long religious holiday weekend. Before the recess, the school teacher met with my mom and told her that I was the only one in class who could not read and write. For the holidays my family had plans to go Bursa to visit my uncle’s side of the family. It ended up being vacation time for everyone in the family except for me. My mom turned the Bursa trip into a writing labor camp so  I can move out from my illiterate situation. Even to this day when I think of the actual trip, the only memory I have, is me sitting at the dinner table with my books, and learning how to write in Turkish. Once the holiday was over and it was time for us to go back to Ankara, I had learned how to read and write. In that sense the writing labor camp was a success. Even though, I had the worst time of my life during that actual holiday in Bursa, I am extremely thankful that my mom took the initiative and forced me to learn how to write in my native language.

Learning How to Write in French

A couple years later my family decided to move to the French speaking part of Switzerland. I was a third grader in Türkiye at that time. If you ask me, I was more of a dreamer, and a terrible student, still not very interested in school work, but somehow I was getting good grades and nobody was giving me trouble. Moving to Switzerland meant that in terms of reading and writing I had to start the entire learning process all over again. Continue reading