When I started taking ESL classes at South Seattle Community College, I did not know how important that program was to get me ready for college.  Since I moved on from second level to third level, I began to feel less enthusiastic with the ESL classes as my instructors just focused on some topics that I have seen in the previous levels such as topic sentence, the main idea in a paragraph, simple, compound, complex, and compound complex sentences, grammar, etc. I wondered why those teachers were so concern about all those topics. Some of my tablemates always complained that they were tired of being taking ESL classes that they wanted to be in college. I just said yes to them and kept doing all my homework assignments on time and practicing all those topics again and again. However, some of my classmates did not pass the ESL COMPAS test because they didn’t do their homework and wanted to jump from ESL to English 101, but I didn’t talk about college and just focused on my ESL classes.

I kept learning ESL for a while and after level 5B I decided to take the ESL COMPAS test. Something usual happen that I got a really good score on grammar skill, ok on listening comprehension, but poor on reading. When I showed my test result to the counselor Virginia, she got surprised and said “wow! This is unbelievable because everybody here has problems with grammar and you are the opposite.” She did not know what decision to make with me and sent me to show the result to Don Bissonette where he was teaching that day. He wrote a note telling Virginia to register me in ESL Transition I. Since then, I have been figuring college level classes out thanks to the significant background I gained in the ESL programs.