I was never a book worm when I first learned to read. My first memory of reading is learning letters in kindergarden by Mrs. Flannery. She was one of those “unique” teachers who had her own style of teaching. She hid a blow up letter somewhere in the room and chose one person to find it everyday; everyone was supposed to get a turn but I was never picked. After the letter was found, she read us a story about something that started with that letter. For example, we would hear a story about apples for the letter “A”. Another teacher, Mrs. Chinchar, taught me in the first grade. She was the nicest woman in the world and has probably looked the same for the past twenty five years. We would have circle time and read a book then sit in our desk and practice our letters.
The first series of books I ever read was a series called “Dear America”. My best friend and I would have sleep overs in my closet and take turn reading outloud, one page at a time. We did this every time we had sleep overs and thought it would be “cool” to keep it a secret and we probably finished ten books together. When my younger brother was learning to read, I would read outloud to him and he would sometimes ask to read outloud with my help. We read all the ten or eleven books of the series called “The Series of Unfortunate Events” by Leminy Snicket. The movie came out a few years ago, staring Jim Carey, and we saw that together and commented how it was inaccurate.
In high school, I took an advanced writing class my junior year. It was taught by an amazing teacher, Mrs. Neville. Mrs. Neville had been my older sister, Jaclyn, most favorite teacher and helped her get into the journalism program at Ohio Univeristy. While being in the advanced writing class, we were required to read a book every two weeks and then write reflections, summaries, and critiques of them. In the beginning of class, we would have ten minutes of freewriting with random prompts. A lot of students would relate the prompts back to books they had read and volunteered to read them aloud. When I listened to the students freewriting, I took all the name dropping of books as recommendations and have a list of a lot of books I want to read eventually.
The books I was required to read for British, American, General and World Literature were important but not very interesting. The most interesting book I ever read was “Anna Karininana” my senior year. I had always heard that everyone that hated the book because of the length but I decided to give it a shot and was very proud of myself for reading every night and not letting anyone tell me the ending. All of these experiences meshed together has given me a postive view of literacy. Even though picking up a book is not the first thing that comes to my mind when I’m thinking of something to do, I do like to read on vacation or if I hear amazing reviews from my family member or friend.