Value in Literacy

In my early childhood I did not have that much experience with reading. I learned to read at the average age, but I decided that I didn’t enjoy it. I did not see the importance of literacy and reading in general. I came to the conclusion that if you read for entertainment, you could get that from a movie. If you read to learn, you can learn more from the news or teachers. The learning aspect of reading I also thought was funny, because today news travels so fast and anything written down is simply old news. So, I only read some of the Bailey School Kids series in third grade because we had to read for a thirty minutes in class. I did enjoy the storyline in the Bailey School Kids series when I was younger, but I thought it took too much time. I found that in school they made you read all of these books that they liked or someone before them called the books “classics”. This made me not enjoy reading even more, I end up not read any of the books we were supposed to read in school up until tenth grade. I learned developed skills on how to pick up the story of the book along with themes, characters personalities, and all of the normal questions you would find on a test without reading the book. I am not proud of what I did, but I did find it kind of funny that I would understand the story and do better on the tests then my fellow students who read the book. I did end up doing some reading on my own though.
In the next few years with the invention of the internet, I started to read online articles. I didn’t mind doing research, so when I did have to do a research paper for class I did read a few nonfiction books. I thought that the internet was the most useful reading source. The internet was the most current news source and I thought that nonfiction was the more productive thing to read. Reading nonfiction I thought was reading information and gaining knowledge that you can use. A story of fiction was just an insufficient use of time, if you wanted entertainment watch a movie that takes half the time.
In the past couple years I have come to find out that I was slightly wrong. The lessons people in my past were trying to teach me about read were misunderstood. I learned that reading books did more than just help you with reading comprehension. I can now tell the difference between some of my classmates who have read consistently and I who may have got better grades in English and Reading classes. I have now made changes in my life style to fit my newly found value in literacy. I started by reading two books over summer break and then three over Christmas break. I tried to read a diverse selection of books with some nonfiction, fiction, newspaper, and internet articles. I see the future and the need for literacy, so I plan on reading a lot to try to catch up to other students and people my age.