Vargas1 Literacy Narrative by: Fernando Vargas

It gets to the point in high school where the counselors ask you what you want to do with your life. I, for one, had no clue what I wanted to do. All I knew was I wanted to be successful and wealthy. I mean who doesnt right? I thought about it for a while on what I wanted to be in life and I decided to go down the road of technology. It was obvious that this world was going into a digital generation. So junior year I sighed up for computer programming. I had an idea of what the class was about. I did not know exactly what we were going to do in that class but I thought it was only basic programming so it couldnt be that bad. Even as a sophomore I had taken A+ Certification, which was a class in repairing computers. It wasnt at all hard to do so maybe it would turn out the same for this class. As I got into the semester, I found out I had to write code for programs in the computer. The code was not easy to understand but it was all logic. Its like writing instructions for a program to do whatever I want it to do. There was a program on the computer called visual basic that we used to write our code and make a program. For example if a restaurant wanted a program for their menu that the customers can make an order off of it, we would use visual basic to make it. The program would have its title with the date then its menu choices to choose from. I would have to categorize all the items into group boxes and make check boxes or radio buttons from which they can click and choose. It involves a lot of math also because when all their items are chosen, I would then have to calculate all of it and return a price for them. Theres many ways to do it but thats the

hard part, having to learn all these different ways and having to learn many technical terms to use on my code. The easy part came in the first semester, where we had to learn the small things like putting buttons and text on the form. Of course its not always going to stay simple because as I got deeper into the chapters it was more code to learn. Its not something I was use too. It was like learning a different language, but unlike computer programming, it was code. I wrote what I could but just some code is not enough for the program to work. The easy parts were the declaration statements, clear methods, putting on the date, for-loop statements, ifthen statements, basically all of first semester. I asked for help but even then that didnt work much. Also part of the problem was the teacher that could not teach it right. I know it sounds hard to believe but it was like us having to learn it on our own most of the time. Yeah she said a few words on how to write the code but not much for me to understand. She gave out packet after packet that we had to read and understand. Every project we did I could not do. I had to have my friend do most of the work for me. I knew that wasnt going to help me but for once I had a class I didnt know to do the work in. I thought maybe technology was not for me. I had no choice but to finish off the semester how I could. It made me reconsider what I wanted to do in life.