Category: Student Posts

Credit: Success Academy Official Website Young kindergartner reading a classic childhood book, highlighting the expectation that Success places on young children.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! The alarm went off at 6 AM every morning, pulling my mom out of sleep before the sun could fully rise. She would rush into the room, nudging me and my siblings awake, her shouting would slap the grogginess out of our eyes as she reminded us to shower and get dressed. Within an hour, we were lined up by the door, waiting for our turn for her to lather baby oil on each of our faces, and come together in a circle to say our grace before we left our apartment. We then made our daily 10 minute commute by walking to our elementary school: Success Academy Bronx 2. Which is known for being one of the strictest schools in New York City as they pushed for early mastery of every subject, especially reading and writing. Those mornings set the tone for what Success Academy expected of us — discipline, punctuality, and structure. Reading and writing were treated with the same urgency as those early wake-ups: something you had to do with no excuse. At the time, I didn’t think of reading as a way to explore or writing as a way to express myself. Instead it felt like a routine I had to master, just like the schedule of my mornings.  At Success Academy Bronx 2 Elementary, the pressure to master reading and writing showed up in every aspect of the school day. Aside from the daily reading logs and complex writing assignments, the most nerve-wracking experiences were the random reading tests. At any moment during the school day, a teacher would pull you out of class to sit you down in a private room to read aloud. The books were labeled by levels, starting with A and progressing all the way to Z. You had exactly four years, from kindergarten to fourth grade, to reach level Z; otherwise, you couldn’t be promoted to middle school. As a kid, the stakes felt very high, which made my relationship with reading and writing seem more like a chore rather than something to love and enjoy. Reading, at the time, wasn’t seen as something for my curiosity or enjoyment but rather survival in a system that measured your intelligence based on the alphabet. Each test made me aware of how I pronounced words and how fast I read. While it taught me discipline and the importance of practice, it also made reading feel like a race against time, where falling behind meant you were not just failing yourself but also failing to meet the school’s expectations. My relationship with reading and writing started to shift once I stopped conforming to the expectations placed on me by Success.  One of the biggest turning points in how I interrupted words was when I joined a summer debate program. At first, I was scared of speaking and having to argue with strangers but it forced me to research, read and break down articles that would help me build arguments, and write with a purpose that wasn’t about following a rubric. I started to see writing as a way to convince and connect people and not just a way to earn a grade. Later, I joined an Afrobeats dance group that gave me another perspective. Even though dancing isn’t a traditional form of reading and writing, music and dancing taught me that expression could be rhythmic. This same idea of rhythm began to blow in my essays and writing prompts, where I found myself writing with more of a flow, almost like telling a story rather than blatantly answering a question, Even now, in this very essay, I’m structuring my writing like a narrative, beginning with the onomatopoeia of an alarm clock to emphasis my stressful mornings of my Success academy childhood and moving through the stages of how I grew up.     Looking back, my journey with reading and writing has been shaped by discipline, going against the norms set on me, and rhythm. Success Academy was pivotal in my journey and gave me a foundation built on structure and mastery, but it also made literacy feel like a strict routine that everyone had to survive to be successful. Later in middle and high school, I began to see how reading and writing could be more interpretive and creative, not just about hitting a standard. And outside the classroom, with the help of debate and Afrobeats, I discovered that my words could carry rhythm, which has shaped the way I read and write forever.