My Life Story

My name’s Maria Ziegler, I’m originally from Elkton, Maryland. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood called West Creek Village and lived with my mom, Dawn, my dad, Kevin, and my older sister Christina. My mom’s originally from South Philly while my Dad was born in Canada and was moved to Newark Maryland at a young age. Unfortunately, my mom had to move away from her family to live in Cecil County because of my dad’s business. I saw my mom’s side of the family a good bit but not as much as I would’ve liked to growing up. Although when I did visit my mom’s side it was always a really good time. They’re all Italian, meaning gatherings with them were always incredibly loud and chaotic. My dad’s side of the family is basically the polar opposite, German and Irish.

My very first memory of reading or writing goes all the way back to kindergarten. My teacher’s name was Ms. Jackson. I don’t remember too much about her besides her voice. I remember she would talk very loud and she never really used big words that I couldn’t understand. She could talk to us like she understood what was going on in my brain, I liked her for that reason. I would walk in the classroom after saying bye to my mom and I would put my big puffy jacket, my lunch, and my book bag into my cubby. Ms. Jackson had us all sit at big round tables. I can distinctly remember her teaching us how to write letters. At first she would give us one to work on, and if we did it right we would get another. I remember working on the letter ‘lowercase A’. I was tracing it on the big stencil that she passed out but for some reason I kept confusing it with ‘uppercase O’. I still remember what she said to me to this day. She told me to pretend to pretend that the lowercase O was a beach ball. You don’t want your beach ball rolling away in the wind, so you have to put a stick next to it to keep it in place. Even today I imagine my lower-case A’s as beach balls with sticks next to them so they don’t roll away.

Eventually, I attended Cecil Manor Elementary School which was about 5 minutes from where I lived. The most prominent memories I have at that point in my life had more to do with recess and playing outside than anything else. I do distinctly remember though one of my favorite teachers as a kid, Ms. Ricketts. Looking back now I realized how young and new to the job she probably was but when I was younger I was convinced she knew everything. I looked up to her because she didn’t teach like the rest of the teachers did, she said things in ways that we could relate to them and she understood that we were just kids. She didn’t expect the world from us or force things out of us. I just remember having a lot of fun in her class. A few times a week we would have reading groups, and each group would meet at a certain table according to which level reader you were. Somehow I ended up in the advanced reading group, and a few times a week a woman would take us to a different room and assign us different books than the other kids were reading. The reading room was a small room filled with a few chairs. Some days we would popcorn read our books, while other days we quietly read to ourselves. After reading certain chapters or finishing the book we would talk about it in a big group, discussing things such as our favorite characters or how we felt about the book. Over time I developed a lot of confidence in my reading and I began to enjoy it.

Another big reading mile stone for me is something small but for some reason I vividly remember it. One day my dad took me to Barnes and Nobles, I was somewhere around the age of 7 at the time. There was a music stand in the corner of the store that held all types of CD’s on it. A set of headphones was connected to the stand so you could sample different CD’s or listen to certain songs. I remember putting the headphones on while my dad was in line buying coffee, I chose to listen to The Beach Boys album. I instantly fell in love. It was their 2003 album “The Sounds of Summer”. My dad walked over with a big smile on his face, surprised with the album I picked out. He said “Do you want me to buy that for you?” I obviously said yes. Then he asked,

“What does the front of the CD say?” I remember staring at the big swirly letters blankly. I couldn’t read it. “If you like their music so much you ought to know who wrote it”, he insisted. We walked to the counter to buy the CD, meanwhile I trailed behind staring at the cover trying to make sense of the abstract letters. On the way home we played the album in his truck listening to the single ‘I Get Around’ while I continued to stare at the letters. My dad, noticing my frustration, turned the music down and said, “What’s that big letter in the beginning?”

“A big B..?”, I answered half confidently.

“Okay good, now just try to figure out the rest of the letters.”

I knew what cursive was and we had practiced it in school, but these letters weren’t really cursive or print. They were a weird hybrid of the two, which threw me off. Eventually, I accepted the fact that the words on that album cover remained foreign to me and just enjoyed the music. I still look back at that album today and remember how much I struggled trying to read the simple words ‘The Beach Boys’.

Sixth grade was when I transferred to a private school called ‘Tome’. My favorite teacher while I was there being my reading and writing teacher, Mrs. Hawk. She was a tall, thin, young woman with thick dark brown hair. She frequently carried around a silver thermos and had an intense passion for hiking and bird watching. Her room was filled with a variety of nature posters along with books full of all the different species of birds. Mrs. Hawk’s classroom was always so welcoming, full of big open windows and lingering positive energy. In the back-left corner of the classroom, carefully protected by Mrs. Hawks L-shaped desk, was our class pet; A Newt. On top of the uplifting environment, I favored that class a lot for what we did in there. I can’t remember it all, but I do remember being given the freedom to simply just write. I didn’t have to worry about any fancy punctuation or run on sentences, I could essentially word vomit on paper. I enjoyed doing this a lot, I think mostly because at that age I had so many ideas flying around in my head that I didn’t want to have to filter and edit. I didn’t want to articulate them or make them more ‘proper’, I just wanted to throw them down on paper as they came to me without concern of if it met any special standards. Mrs. Hawk gave me the chance to do that, and it made writing a lot more enjoyable for me.

In retrospect, these milestones may seem minute or trivial, but they must have greatly impacted me if I can still reflect on them many years later. Insignificant things such as help with writing a basic letter or trying to decode the name of my favorite album at the time have all shaped me into the person I am today. I owe a lot to my family and teachers that took that extra five minutes to help me understand something or learn something new. As I move forward into my future endeavors I continue to learn and grow as a student. I’m able to take everything that I’ve learned over the years and put those skills into my biology lab reports. The reading and writing skills I have learned over time will allow me to write adequate care plans for my future patients. I’m thankful for everyone that put their time into me to help shape me into the person I am today.