1

My mom used to have me read a book series called The Magic Tree House by Mary Pope Osborne. This book series sculpted the relationship for reading  i have today. My mom and i would switch off reading reading each chapter. This style of reading allowed me to progressively increase my reading skills with the help of my mother.  It taught me how to read stories, and connect the sentences to make it sound smooth when i read each sentence. This outside practice from school made me advance my literary skills, when speaking and when reading. My mom made reading interesting, this was due to the fact that she also liked reading books, and listening to me read. Because of this i have a certain place in my heart for a reading books.

The reason why i liked reading so much was not only because of the books i was reading but who i was reading them with. When the newest book of the series would come out, we would drive to the nearest bookstore to go pick it up. This made me look forward to reading books when i was younger. When we would read, i would get under the covers of my bed, and she would pull up a chair. We would read every night until i either fell asleep or until we finished the book. I can remember it hurting my hand to keep the book open by the end of the night because i was reading for such a long period of time. This literary moment made me not mind reading books in class while the other kids would complain.

2

 

When i was learning to write, my teacher noticed that i was holding my pencil differently than other kids in the class. My teacher and mom came to the decision that if i held my pencil like the others, my writing would be more legible. This meant that i would have to adapt to writing a completely different way than i have learned up to that point. For a couple weeks i tried to write in the normal way, this effort did not show to be worth the result. The change in writing style caused me to fall behind the other students in pace, when the real effort i should have put in was in the beginning working how my own writing technique.

When i switched to the common way of holding the pencil it took me longer to write. When i was almost done with my writing workbook, the other students would be waiting for me to finish. I would be halfway done as the other kids would be finishing their writing. This was because i couldn’t write as fast as they could, and i my handwriting looked even worse. This caused the whole class to wait, as they waiting for just me to finish. The kids would glare at me for not being done, and would ask the teacher to start the lesson without me. This felt like a lot of pressure on me as a 3rd grader, and i would half answer the question to just be done like everyone else. Even though it would strain my hand my own writing style was what was best for me.

After no success of improving my writing appearance or speed, my mom and i decided that i should just write my own way. After going back to my normal way, my mom helped me practice my writing, which made me improve the right way. I would write letters to my grandparents and making up stories to write down. My mom helped me write better, because she saw how my writing held me back from completing my goals. This taught me that it is better to do it my own way rather than trying to catch up in someone else’s way. There was no reason for me to try and write differently just because it is not as neat nor normal. Not only did this help me write more fluently, but also made it more interesting to write due to my unique way.

3

During high school, I did not take extra time out of the day to read, like I normally would when I was younger. During my freshman year, I experienced the worst type of reading in my World History 1 class. For homework in the class we had to reading 20 pages in this very old history book, it was the most challenging book I have ever read. This made me hate reading, just because the reading was so difficult to understand. During a certain time, each week we would have a quiz on one of the sections that we read, this forced me to try a lot harder when trying to read the book. When I was struggling to try, and find any details that made sense while reading the book, I decided to try and underline some important information. While this did not drastically improve my grade, it taught me to focus on important information mentioned in-between the lines. Although I struggled in that class, with the difficult reading assigned each night or the teacher not providing a good lesson on what the book says, I still got something out of it. I could pick out details in the text when I underlined them, making it easier for me to understand what I was reading. This is a skill that I use today, some teachers require the student to annotate, when I must do that to fully understand what I’m reading anyway. I would lay down on my bed at night and try to concentrate on the section assigned for homework that day, hoping that nights reading would be better than the last. I would constantly move from my desk to the bed, acting like where I was reading affected how much information I absorbed. I would try to find any excuse to stop reading, so I took breaks laying on my bed in which I’d try to remember what I just read. This most of the time just put me to sleep without finishing my reading. My teacher did not help the student if they did not understand the reading that night. Every class I sat through 50 minutes of slide after slide of information that was vaguely in the text the night before. He would try and explain the importance of matching his effort in class with our effort at home with reading. What he probably never did was read the text himself, because I believed he was asking the impossible. But what I got out of this frustrating and confusing part of my education, was that I could highlight certain sentences in the reading and connect ideas throughout the book.