Reflection About Reading

People who read acquire an extensive vocabulary and knowledge in certain topics that for example, in a college student these two factor are important. If we grow up thinking or influenced that reading is boring, there are low possibilities than when we grow up we will be active readers. Reading brings to us a wide range of themes, where we get to find out what are we interested in. During college, as students we usually found ourselves seating in front of a screen and a keyboard waiting for ideas about what to write in our papers. We are aware what we want to write, and we feel the motivation to write, but somehow we do not have a foundation about the topic of our interest. Imagine if we could had been reading since we were little? From simple children stories to the more challenging readings, but we could have obtained the basic knowledge we need when writing college essays. Our lives will be easier that

“A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted at the end. You live several lives while reading”, said William Styron, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Confessions of Nat Turner. I absolutely agree with Styron’s expressive view of what reading is like. Reading has shaped me into the person I am today and yet unendingly persists to keep changing me. The root of my passion for reading came from the reading I was forced to do when I was a child. Once I embraced reading as a habit, my curiosity got the best of me to pay attention to what I was reading. Concentrating led to my sudden change of attitude toward reading.

Forward to the future, I feel that reading is a valued asset to do to gain knowledge, but I do not read unless I am required to do so. I know that it is a bad quality to have when being a student, but I do not like to read. So I do not read for pleasure, anymore, but I do read for academic purposes, which is essential for a student. What I find most difficult in reading is being interested in the author’s subject or the message the author is trying to convey. Although, some authors do stretch out their point/content as a creative style and/or to create suspense for the reader the reading tends to lose its appeal. Whether it may be long syntax or just how long the book or text is can lose my interest. The style of the reading that I’m, mainly, required to read gets too boring for me.

Growing up I was never the best writer or reader. Every time I read a certain book for school, I tend to just read past the lines and not know what I just read. Some material would be interesting but never caught my attention to the point that attracted my interests. Writing was extremely difficult since it takes a lot of patience and exact wording that I need to use to make my essay come out clean. Plenty of ideas would come up when I am writing my paper, however I just don’t know how to get it all down on the piece of paper. My mind would go off tangent to think about the ideas that I wrote before on the paper and then I will try to include those ideas into my paper. This causes a negative flow throughout my essay and results of the

It is very difficult for me to enjoy reading when I am forced to read books or articles

From the point when I was a little girl to now, I have changed my ways of thinking about reading and writing a lot. I remember back in kindergarten I was put in a program called ESOL, I absolutely hated it; I felt stupid because I was one of few kids that went there from my class. I was later to learn that it was because I didn't speak English. In that program they would pull us out of class to help us with reading and writing, and the clearest memory I have is being sat at a table with the teacher and not really wanting to read and her forcing me to sound out every word and follow along with my finger. This early on in my life I did not enjoy reading, I thought it was boring and there was no point to it. This continued until I got removed from ESOL in third grade. That was when I picked up a book I actually enjoyed, Sideways Stories from Wayside School, I automatically fell in love with it. This was the turning point for my way of seeing reading and writing.

Reading and writing weren’t my strongest qualities through-out high school, but in the tenth grade at West Morgan High School I built the foundation for being able to write a mediocre essay. A man by the name of Shannon Shaw was my teacher and he is the reason I have the tools to construct a genuine essay. Another year passed and I was in the eleventh grade and I decided to duel enroll at Calhoun for a history course and because of this it really perfected the methods Mr. Shaw had taught me. My final year of high school, I encountered my first actual research paper in economics class, which was an absolute horror show for me. If it wasn’t for this class and the instructor Melanie Holliday, I would have absolutely no idea how to cite sources or do something as simple as research for an assigned topic.

How I learned to read was with my mother who would read Dr. Seuss books. I would listen to her read the books and look at the pictures to help me understand what she was saying to me. We kept working and working, learning how to read before kindergarten. We would read about every night when she got off work to help me.

I have never despised reading; I just could not grasp the importance of reading and how it would beneficial to me and my growth. Not only were my teachers pressing this upon me but my parents as well, the passages that I had to read in class were not the problem. The dilemma occurred when the hours interfered with my after school free time and having “reading time” in school, I had no passion in becoming an author or journalist. Why must I sacrifice my free time to read a book that has nothing to do with my aspirations and goals in life? This was a reoccurring predicament that kept surfacing until the beginning of my fifth year in elementary school that would change my entire outlook on the matter.

It was my second grade year, I was only 7 years old, when I first found my hatred of anything that had to do with reading or writing. Every week my teacher would give us a lengthy list of vocabulary words that we had to memorize before our spelling test the following week. I would study for periods at a time trying to memorize this gruesome lists of words, that I could never commemorate. When it came down to the day of the test I would see all my classmates at ease, while I would panic trying to remember what I studied. When it finally became time to take the test, I heard the teacher call the word “island”, but I couldn’t concentrate. I was frustrated, I couldn’t think, the teacher would ask “is everyone ready to move on”, but I wouldn’t say anything, because I was too shy. After a couple of days I would get my score back, and wasn’t surprised when I found out that I had failed the test. Weekley this was recurring theme when I got my spelling test returned. Eventually, I accepted the fact that reading and writing was not for me.

The reading and writing practice that were done in class help me implement new technique in my writing. There were presentations in class that discussed different ways to become a better writer. The skills that were developed help with my writing and can use the skills to implement in others course, helping to form better essay. I learned about words that are not recommended of being used, how to transition, and where to look for good scholarly articles. A practice that was done for every assignment was to go over the first draft and finding new ways to improve upon it. Going over the first draft help me improve my writing.

After doing a read aloud and independent reads of the fable The Crow and the Pitcher & The Tortoise and the Hare, through reading aloud or independent read, students will reflect on situations in their life that present challenges. Students will be divided up into groups of four with five students in each cluster and discuss one of the fables read in class. Students will reflect on the challenges the character faces in the story. Each group will come up with evidence, showing the challenges the character faced. The group will explain how these challenges brought strength to the character. Each group will come up with evidence to show how the challenges the character faces can also bring strength to the character. Students will write and draw an example of something in their life that describes the moral presented in the story they analyzed.

According to a survey done by the Pew Research Center in 2016, “About a quarter of American adults (26%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form.” I believe I form part of this demographic group because I don't like reading books. I would say that my past experiences have made me into being a non reader. Therefore, I will explain to you my process of how I learned to read and who influenced my success, what were my favorite books back then and now, and how my past experiences have shaped me into the reader I think I am.Thus, I believe that I am not a reader.

Have you ever felt embarrassed about something but didn’t know how to handle it? That was me about reading out loud or reading overall. Reading was a huge problem for me. I never took it serious because I had the attitude, “I will find out how to do it one day.” Baltimore taught me a lot, but it failed me a lot also. What I mean by that is that it will show things that will not help you prosper in life such as how to sell drugs, how to hang out on the corner, and how to shoot and kill people. Although Baltimore can expose your eyes to some bad things, it can also expose you to some positivity. Baltimore will make you want to get on your grind and go to college to get a degree, be successful, and it will teach you that minimum wage is not acceptable these days. So when I say Baltimore has taught me a lot, but it has failed me as well, this is what I mean. My challenges followed me through elementary school where I didn’t value my education, middle school where I began to value my education and through my breakthrough in high school where my education became extremely important to me.

I am going to be honest, I am not a great reader nor do I enjoy reading most of the time. In all my years of school, I always excelled in math, science, and other subjects that involve numbers, while I always felt reading, and English was the subject I always was below average at best. Just because I don’t like to read, that does not mean I won’t try to get better at that skill. I have tried to make myself better at reading by doing reading exercises or noredinks and other forms of help which helped with all the little things, but it never helped me with my main problem, which was not understanding what the moral of the story was. Every year when I get my scores back to English or Reading test I always feel left behind because almost everyone was doing better than me while I put the same amount of effort into reading. I was getting frustrated and sometimes made me upset because I could not understand most of my native language while others flourished in it.