My Journey of Becoming Literate
From an adolescent in elementary school to a rat in the ratline my reading and writing skills have improved over the course of my academic journey. Being in school for 13 years I have been taught different strategies for writing by a wide variety of people, mostly consisting of teachers. Starting with the fundamentals of how to read and write simple words in elementary school, to writing basic essays in middle school, and now writing literacy narratives in college. My journey has shaped my preferences as a reader and my tendencies as a writer.
At the very beginning of my academic career in elementary school I had no knowledge or opinions of reading and writing, which would soon change. Even though I vaguely remember the days of practicing my ABC’s or weekly spelling tests, I do remember what I struggled with while learning how to write, and the types of reading I enjoyed. At first writing seemed so simple, the teacher would give us a topic and all we would have to do is write down bullet points that were related to the topic. For example, if “The benefits of recess” was written on the board we’d write things like: fun, happy, exercise, friends, games, etc. Then as time went on writing became more complex. We started writing paragraphs where we’d take one of our bullet points and expand on that idea to explain it and form simple sentences like “Recess is good because it lets kids exercise”. At this point I was already starting to form negative thoughts about writing because at the same time I was excelling in other subjects such as math and science and couldn’t be bothered to spend my time reading or writing. Unsurprisingly, writing became even more complicated, we started to write short essays where we had to pick out a couple of our bullet points, write a thesis, and support that thesis throughout our essay while maintaining good fluidity. This was all a little overwhelming for me at the time since I was focusing on more technical subjects and didn’t feel that learning abstract subjects like writing was necessary. Boy was I wrong, the negative feeling towards writing that I formed in fifth and sixth grade grew into a sense of resentment right before middle school where I had a writing assignment due almost every week. I’ll go into more detail about middle school soon but first I’d like to talk about my experience with reading in elementary school. In grade school I actually loved to read. Not only would I read books that were assigned for classes, I’d also read books outside of school whenever I had time. The reason I read so much is I found books, mostly fictional, that I genuinely enjoyed to read. There was something about fictional books like Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer that peeked my interests and got me to read for fun. Unfortunately that enjoyment was short lived and eventually came to a grinding halt as soon as middle school rolled around.
Middle school changed my attitude towards reading and writing from tolerating writing assignments and reading for fun to hating writing and only reading books that were assigned to me. This dramatic swing in attitude was mostly caused by the activities I was involved in such as baseball, bowling, and golf. These activities took up a lot of my time, making it where I was typing papers the night before they were due and reading assignments late at night to make sure I stayed caught up for class. These tendencies combined with the rising expectations in my writing classes placed a lot of stress on me making middle school an unpleasant memory of mine. This resulted in my interests narrowing from a broad range of subjects to completely focusing on the things I excelled at, particularly math. I couldn’t think of anything worse than to sit down and write a paper for an English class. I would think to myself “Oh I’m just going to be an engineer why am I wasting my time trying to learn something I’ll never use” and just have an overall bad attitude towards writing. My negativity reflected in my work and in return my grades dropped, making me even more annoyed with the subject. On the other hand, unlike my feelings towards writing, I still loved to read. The only difference was that instead of reading fiction books I started to read nonfiction books. I was just starting to develop an interest in the military and would read books about World War II whenever I had time. Unfortunately with sports and homework filling my free time, my reading habits eventually diminished to virtually nothing. Looking back now, I wish I had made different decisions that would have allotting time for me to sit down and read more because my reading skills were hindered going into high school.
Moving into high school having negative thoughts of writing and barely-average reading skills was a scary thing for me. I thought high school would be so demanding in those subjects where I’d have an essay due every week and that I’d constantly be under a great deal of stress. I wasn’t wrong about having frequent writing assignments due almost every week but to my surprise I didn’t get stressed out by them. This is because in my high school I had a lot of resources at my disposal to critique my essays and teachers would use class time to give students feedback. One instructor in particular named Mr. Hogan was a major factor in changing my mind about how I feel about writing. He taught his class in a way that I understood really well and he took time to individually meet with us and give us suggestions before we turned our assignments in. The individualized help and how he laid out exactly what he wanted created a structured environment that I had been longing for in middle school. In return, despite the difficulty of the writing classes rising, my grades rose too and I didn’t dread going to writing class anymore. During this time I had developed more efficient strategies for doing homework and wasn’t involved with as many activities so I was able to read more too. I was reading non-fiction books like Lone Survivor and American Sniper because at this point I knew I wanted to serve in the military and it was just a topic I was interested in reading about.
My high school attitudes towards writing have stuck with me and nowadays I still enjoy fields like mathematics and physics but I don’t despise writing as I did in elementary and middle school. This is because my confidence in my writing was restored by, who I consider to be my only literacy sponsor, Mr. Hogan in eleventh grade. Unlike my opinions of writing, I have always loved to read whenever I had time. Over the course of my academic life I haven’t had a lot of time to read, including the situation I’m in right now being a rat, but I have continued to enjoy reading which I think I will always be the case.